In addition to debating which worldview is better for society with Andrew Wilson on Sunday November 16 (see my previous announcement) I am now also scheduled to debate whether God exists at all with Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy the previous day, Saturday the 15th. I will be tabling with a limited amount of books to sell and sign after each debate. Live IRL events with me are rare now so you might want to get a whole-day pass and enjoy all the debates that weekend. I’ll be around. And I hear it’s selling out, so now’s the time to buy and plan.
Check out the roster and other details and get tickets now! It’s pricier at the door and could be sold out by then. And I would really appreciate having more supporters in the audience—so it’s not just all Connor Estelles. I expect to be be available for the special-cost meet & greets and dinners Saturday and Sunday (though you should still ask the hosts to be sure, as instructed at the site, since there may be limits on how many can get in on those).
Feel free to come up and say hi if you see me. I don’t plan to socialize much apart from officially (whether as audience or VIP). But if you are an organizer for a group out there who wants to talk to me about arranging another event in or around Nashville some other weekend, find me there or reach out anytime.
Do you know the format for each debate already? I don’t know how much I’m looking forward to the Wilson debate. Everything I’ve seen of him has been a constant stream of questions/attacks to avoid actually engaging with the facts.
IP is more of a classic debater, but he also constantly cherry picks data and reframes what his sources actually say. It would be interesting to see him have to contend with someone who actually understands the sources, but that also makes me think he’s just going to base his arguments around something he thinks you aren’t as versed in. I also suspect he’ll try to turn the debate on your mythicist position as much as possible to try to score rhetorical points with the audience.
Yes. The debate formats are pretty standard. Nothing either shady or innovative. They each will have discussion/interrogatory sections but not of great length. I don’t know the quality of moderation, but I’m used to that never being done well. So I’ll just be prepared for Wilson’s bullshit tactics just as I was Sargon’s. And yeah, your predictions are IMO likely right. I was already expecting that myself.
Except I doubt he’ll venture into mythicism in this debate as it’s too far removed and thus would burn clock on something too hard to make emotionally relevant to the audience. It’s bad strategy even for a disingenuous debater. And note, he has already hinted his intention is not even to defend the truth of Christianity—his position is Neoconservative (Straussian): that Christianity is better for society even if ontologically false. Which is a common white-male-supremacist ideological framework now. Whether he does that explicitly or not, that leads me to suspect he’ll do a more Kirkian thing, and not burn clock in the weeds of esoteric religious debate but try and go direct at culture war stuff.
I frankly love everyone who does that. They’ve lost the plausible deniability from before open fascism. When the fascist moment passes, the fact that so many of these people so openly said, in effect, “Christianity is so homophobic, transphobic, and brutal that I don’t even care if it’s false, it is the best lie I can use as a cudgel to hurt people” will singlehandedly be an immense disproof of their religion. And it is likely to shame a lot of people out of the church or into more liberal Christianities when the power of the state is not allowing conformity through silence and violence.
Apparently, most people do not know what fascism is. It’s socialism and government control of everything to be simplistic about it. And of course, people vote away their economic civil, and personal rights in order to be taken care of by the government. And then people find out that socialism and communism are just theft. Cuba’s dictator. Fidel Castro always. claimed to be socialist, but it was communist in which the government owned everything. Socialism, you may think you own something, but the government controls it so there’s really not a lot of difference in the end between socialism and communism.
And yes, socialism and communism is designed to make it all fair and equal and that’s true. Everybody becomes equally poor except the top government apparatchiks who live like princes. While the poor starve. No one. has ever seen boats going to Cuba. They’re always coming to the US for freedom.
Hitler was a socialist… and this was changed to Hitler was a fascist because the socialists did not want to be associated with Hitler. Fact.
There is not a Hair difference. hair’s difference between socialism and fascism. However, people are now using the word fascist to do anybody you don’t politically like.
Kash Patel understand the depths of socialist control, and corruption that it has to resort to in order to stay in power. When people start going without food and electricity, they start rejecting socialism for the good old days of capitalism. But here is FBI Director Patel and you tell me he is not qualified to be in position.
Patel studied criminal justice and history at the University of Richmond and graduated from the Pace University School of Law. In 2005, he began working as a public defender in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and later as a federal public defender for the Southern District of Florida. Patel worked as a staff member at the Department of Justice from 2012 to 2017; he then left the department and became a senior aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Patel was the primary author of the Nunes memo, alleging that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials abused their authority in the FBI investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials.
In February 2019, Patel joined the National Security Council‘s International Organizations and Alliances directorate. In 2020, he became the principal deputy director of national intelligenceuntil May, when he returned to the National Security Council. In November, after President Donald Trump dismissed Mark Esper as secretary of defense, Patel was named as the chief of staff to acting secretary of defense Christopher C. Miller.
Patel is more than qualified to be an FBI Director was chosen by Trump because he did not come up through the ranks sitting on his butt as a bureaucrat. He was on the ground and in the streets and undercover and also witnessed as well as being subjected to an incredible amount of harassment by Joe Biden’s spy apparatus, trying to stop his investigations as any good FBI agent would who is so not supposed to be biased or influenced by any political party.
And here’s more diversity in the Trump administration, FBI Director Patel and Tulsi Gabbard DNI Director are Hindus. Elon Musk is an atheist as are many of his DOE staff. Dr. Oz is a Muslim. There are so many Jews I can’t even count them and there’s not that many who are strict Orthodox Jews. Pete Hegseth is a Christian with a Jerusalem, cross tattooed on his chest. No, that is not a Nazi symbol, sorry. However, I do not know of a single Satanist.
There is no monolithic strict MAGA “Hi Hitler“ people in charge of the trump administration. That’s the biggest joke of all. If anything, “Trump is the most pragmatic president in history who has no overarching philosophy.” That’s been noted by quite a few people, including those on the left who are honest.
This is all false or not relevant to the point made, Diana. I don’t know where you are getting any of this. But you need to question and fact-check your sources more keenly before believing stuff like this (Hitler was not a socialist). And you need to pay more attention to the actual statements you mistakenly think you are rebutting.
Case in point: Patel has zero experience running a law enforcement agency (no comparable management experience, no out-of-the-courtroom enforcement experience, no policing or FBI experience). He’s just a lawyer who served in a few secretarial positions in Trump’s first admin. And his catastrophically poor performance running the FBI demonstrates that indeed real qualifications matter. Here is a full run-down of the reality at Politico.
Another case in point: Trump cut the number of women in the cabinet in half and has the whitest cabinet in U.S. history. Yet you fall for tokenism. This bespeaks a gullibility you should be alarmed about and work on abandoning. You need to not fall for false narratives based on fallacious arguments. Desperately you need this. Because the world needs that from you. Your gullibility is what is ruining the world. We need to stop behaving like that.
For a correct take on how racist and sexist Trump’s cabinet is, see this statistical analysis. Biden had non-white members at almost 50% (close to national reality). Obama, even Bush, had it at almost a third. Trump in both terms has it at 10%. He cut it by a third from Obama, and five times less than Biden.
That’s reality. Not propaganda. You need to get with reality, not with propaganda. You need to skill your mind to be immune to propaganda, not easily infected by it.
Wow. I wondered why you allowed Diana’s comment to be posted here, as it was complete nonsense. Trump groveling supporters rely upon ignorance and conjecture and blind loyalty. It’s obvious what Trump’s “overarching philosophy” is, it matches what we expect from an spoiled eight-year old.
Hitler attacked communists. He used slave labor to benefit corporations. He enshrined private property and bigoted Christianity. He was not a communist or a leftist.
The only reason you think he was is because they used the name “national socialist”.
Which also means you should believe that Hitler really just wanted lebensraum, and there was actually a Jewish cabal, and the Japanese really were fighting imperialism, and the USSR were republics and socialist democracies.
You can’t even be gullible consistently.
Hitler constantly railed against communism as a Jewish conspiracy.
To understand why Nationalsozialistische did not mean socialist in current parlance (but “national” welfare, i.e. the welfare of the nation), which they cynically invented as a term to appeal disingenuously to left and right wing voters, see this video by German fascism expert Three Arrows.
Though it did involve some kinds of welfare, it was the same kinds of welfare even American Republicans support (subsidies for “white working families,” and indeed you can find Republicans today advocating for any one of these Nazi Aryan programs). Wikipedia actually has a good article explaining the fascist cynicism behind this idea.
The only tiny rub to any of this is that the early Nazis did have some working-class influence. So some Nazis may have been authentically socialist. (Still probably racist, or misogynist, or wanting to kick teeth in, or militarist, or otherwise with the Nazis rather than the extensive left-wing parties available at the time for some reason). But that’s exactly what the Night of the Long Knives got rid of: Gay, working class, and other influences in the party.
Anyone who talks to modern Nazis can see how unsurprising this is. They happily juice the numbers with left-wingers and right-wingers, like hanging on barnacles on anti-Israeli groups or (as Q does) children’s rights groups, using them as a vehicle to spread their bigoted bullshit. A few gullible people fall for it and get sucked into the movement. But when they’re ready, they kick out these “degenerates”.
The early socialist appeal of the party was a chrysalis they knew they would discard.
That the Nazis captured a working class movement that way is similar to how Republicans did, only without just killing everyone still in for the original plan, but system-corrupting their way to it. They claim to be a working class party but are almost entirely an elite corporate class party; they claim to stand for rural America, but actually stand almost entirely for Wallstreet and don’t care at all about solving any real rural problems.
This also describes most of the Democrats in power, but the proportion who aren’t going along with that is much larger there than among Republicans (both at the in-power level and the voting level). So the Republican party more resembles the Nazi party (as pseudo-populists) than the Democratic Party (who are more like a mushy oligarchy). Neither are socialist. But the DNC has a growing socialist wing and is thus moving in the opposite direction to what the Nazis did, while the GOP is moving toward it (by possibly every metric).
Yep. The Republicans were proto-fascist in the 2000s and early 2010s and became outright fascist when Trump blundered his way into that metagame.
On Quora, I have to correct people on the Democrats being meaningfully leftist daily, though now I do have to concede the growing socialist wing (which, of course, I am happy about).
The classic retort to this ie why would he attack communist if he were a socialist is the same as why Sunnēs would attack Ṡē’ēs since they’re Muslim.
Apparently Mussolini was a socialist academic editor of Avanti?
And when the NaSocs were writing up their articles – they used the Democrat model…but found it too extreme!
(this is per a Dinesh D’Souza documentary – which the critics hated and and the plebs loved)
Mussolini flipped on the socialists and joined the fascists (arguably because he saw an easier path to accolades and power there—these guys tend to actually be non-ideological and just take whatever pose gets them to autocracy).
The rest I don’t even comprehend. What is a “Democrat” model? And which NaSocs are we talking about? And how was a “Democrat” model too extreme for them?
(And yes, D’Souza is a liar and convicted felon with zero qualifications of relevance, so no, we definitely should not be reading his books about anything.)
Every time I’ve heard Andrew Wilson debate he always refers to the Bible is proof sooner or later. It’s predictable. But I enjoyed listening to you.
Yeah, I’ve seen Wilson debate song with others of his group…. They can debate ‘well’ but ultimately biased arguments. I’m beginning to think they do it just for laughs mostly, appealing to their fan base. They are there really to just get notice and in a sense not worth debating as just gives them more exposure
I know it is not a philosophical argument, but it is a very powerful one nevertheless. While we can never prove god(s) do(es) not exist, we can raise the issue of why so very many different, all exclusionary religions have existed all over the world, many completely independent of each other, but each of them telling how humans need to behave towards each other and the gods, if there is only one correct religion? Does Occam’s razor not support the easier answer, which is that humankind is inherently prone to invent something to explain what it cannot explain and to (pseudo) influence (through prayers and gifts) what it cannot influence? As a mental defense mechanism? Seems very logical.
We certainly can. In the popular sense of prove, as in, “demonstrate with evidence to be extraordinary improbable and thus not worth even entertaining much less believing.” See Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof and Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism?.
As for your proposed approach, indeed, that’s item 6 in Bayesian Counterapologetics.
debates are fine but these cultists need to be asked to demonstrate their jesus given abilities to have any prayer answered and to do miracles like ol’ Jesus.
It depends on what you mean by “need.”
Rhetorically (i.e. emotionally, and thus as relates to a time-limited oral debate), that’s a clock waster. Because their rabbithole-architecture of conclusion avoidance on that question is so massive we’d just burn the whole debate arguing over pointless minutiae and have gotten nowhere near the point of the debate.
So, no, I won’t be wasting much clock on that. I’ll mention the meta-point (no differential divine intervention has been observed warranting any religion over another) but my focus will be on far more efficient points of contention (i.e. far harder to emotionally avoid, whose rabbithole-architecture has itself too many holes I can use to return them to the point, and with which I can thus more easily score a clear rational and emotional win in the limited time available).
As far as a worldview that belief in God prevents crime or makes society, more civilized or better just remind him that according to FBI statistics going back 50 years Christians commit 22 times more crime than atheists per capita.
Sometimes as a response Christian will say “well they’re not real Christians then.“
And I always repeat back “well isn’t that what belief in God is supposed to do especially if you pray and go to church make you a better person? But that seems to fail far too often to be credible.
I think that “forgiveness“ in many Christian’s minds is a “free get out of jail card” consciously or subconsciously and so it’s much easier for them to commit crimes because they “no and I’ve been told 1000 times “they’ll be forgiven.”
And I also find it strange how many hip-hop & gangster rappers whose song lyrics are about committing crimes —also wear big fat crosses! “Forgiveness” was obviously a propaganda tool of fourth century Roman empire state craft, especially by the Roman Catholic Church especially as the selling point too attract converts. You didn’t have to buy a bull that could cost a whole years wages, slaughter it, and get yourself drenched in blood “be forgiven.”
From early Christianity on selling Jesus and God has been big business and about making money. “Forgiveness“ is just another advertising tool like toothpaste, advertisers, claiming that their product whitens your teeth better.
As Richard has pointed out, this is a classic motte-and-bailey no true Scotsman on their part. When they need a big tent, there are 1.6 billion Christians. When they need to disavow, suddenly Christianity is a tiny, irrelevant cult. But they need the big tent to make it look like their position is smart, diverse, intuitive and responsible for all the good stuff. If only their tiny church are real Christians, well, their tiny church didn’t end slavery, or create democracy, or create science.
This is part of the entire con of much Christian evangelism. When they start with the sales pitch (and you can literally see this in a single video), God is obvious, belief in It will immediately change your life, God will actually instantly prove Itself to you the moment you are sincere, and the Bible will just instantly change you and make so much sense and answer all your questions. Then when you point out that, no, It doesn’t, suddenly actually prove Itself to you, you have to circularly define a ton of coincidences as not coincidences (and not count the misses) and brainwash yourself, and of course the Bible doesn’t answer all the questions but you should act like it does. I noticed this first in my teens when I heard Christians tell me that the Bible has every answer to every relevant question, quoting Reagan. I asked what the Bible had to say about surgical procedure. They would go blank-eyed or get annoyed. All they had actually done was prove that their religion destroyed their curiosity and integrity enough that they never actually asked complex questions about anything. To say nothing of compartmentalizing their beliefs (while not being honest enough to notice they were doing that) and covering up that they, like all people, have had points where they had questions and pains the Bible didn’t actually answer and they went to bed scared or stressed or angry.
I am very curious and excited to see how you’ll engage with IP. My read of him is that he was actually relatively honest (and more in the Craig line of a relatively politically liberal and scientific faith), but has over time embraced the grift and sounds more and more like a very disingenuous preacher.
Craig is a political liberal? He’s anti-choice and anti-gay and is happy with the conservative capture of SCOTUS and defends biblical genocides as righteous, and defended the election of Trump on the argument that policy matters more than character (a neocon POV), and openly avoids discussing issues like immigration or the Gaza genocide for reasons that sound like woke-fishing. I think he’s definitely 100% neocon. Not an ounce liberal. He’s just theologically right-center on things like evolution or executing gay people. Which is, again, Neocon.
So, do you have evidence Jones is politically liberal? Or do you mean he’s like Craig in just being stock center-right?
To be clear: I mean that Jones, from what I can see, is not openly transphobic, homophobic, etc. The comparison with Craig is that they both try to present a more erudite version of Christianity that, say, dismisses creationism. I agree Craig is quite clearly a neocon; I think Jones is probably also center-right but in the modern millennial/gen Z/gen alpha mode where they’re not as overt about the most grotesque of the identity politics.
I’ve only ever seen debunks of Jones on his really terrible philosophy, but the folks I’ve seen who engage with him would likely have mentioned his politics if they were extreme
But, for example:
And some videos.
Here’s him with Hunter Avallone.
Critically, what I am seeing from all of this is the smarmy dishonesty Insipid Sophistry is associated with, which is more about pivoting away from the bigotry… but in our environment, any Christian who refuses to actually say the bigoted part out loud is going to get a golf clap from me.
No Craig is not a political liberal on any level.
Indeed. As Fred corrected, he meant center-right, i.e. more liberal than Christian nationalists, not “liberal” as such.
Yes, I said “relatively” liberal for a reason. In the modern era, they must be compared to the outright science-denying fascists who are now the rank and file.
You’re wrong about neocons. Neocons are former Democrats who became War Hawks and wants the Republican Party to turn into a big government, pro war “kill them before they kill us” militarists. supporting a huge “military industrial complex.“ Maga voters do not like neocons for that reason.
Neocons are aligned with the George Bush RINOs (Republicans in name only) crowd that wants a huge spy apparatus and an overarching government listening in on or conversations —which again the Maga faction hates with a passion.
The Maga fraction does not want to engage in any wars, wants to withdraw from the Ukraine, and wants very limited foreign aid, Maga basically wants the government to leave people alone and stop meddling & “social engineering” domestically & around the world. Why? Because it’s what the Democrats have been doing illegally including trying every dirty trick in the book to put President Trump underneath the jail and prevent him from running for office for the past 16 years. The Democrat party is no longer your fathers or JFK.’s democrat party.
The Republican party has about four separate identifiable factions with a neocons being one crossing over into the RINO country club Republicans, which President Trump and Maga action kicked out of leadership positions. And the evangelicals, which is a separate group of nut cases who want Christianity to be a national religion, especially their brand. They want the Bible taught in public schools along with prayer.
Here is the good news. The Republicans that are in charge, are solid pro American, successful, billionaires, and business people and public servants who are dedicated to getting this country’s economy, and it’s government agencies back on track and the massive corruption, weaponization of government against political enemies and theft of the taxpayers money that put us $34 trillion in debt stopped and prevented from ever happening again. Why? Because if the US goes broke, they go broke.
President Trump‘s cabinet is the most professional cabinet in history. Furthermore, they let all these other GOP factions say what they want to, but they do not allow them to fulfill any of their crazy nutcase, political and war mongering or religious desires.
For example: President Trump regarding abortion said it was the “states issue“ and they could vote on whether they wanted to do it or not. That’s reasonable. President Trump kept the silly Christians from banning IVF.
Trump may sound and look like as if he’s religious, but he’s not in the least. I checked and the only time he ever went to church was for funerals and weddings. He’s too much of a common sense hard-core businessman to believe in mythology and religious fantasies. He keeps the Christian radicals under control while at the same time having them believe he just loves and respect them dearly.
Christians are valuable to the GOP because they are a voting block of 50 million people and handed him the presidency, & the GOP the house and the Senate.
Furthermore, the last thing the politicians who believe in common sense like Democrat John Fetterman or the business people in President Trump’s candidate want is a bunch of radical nut cases on the far left or the far right to start a Civil War and tear this country apart.
I am amazed about how much punishment & abuse US federal agents and ICE take from antifa and illegal aliens… because that very well could be a flashpoint to start the far radical right showing up with AR15s and shotguns and blowing antifa away. Because I know they’re tempted. And it is President Trump that keeps it all under control. He has been anti-war from the earliest days of his political career and opinions.
Though some of the original neocons were center-left and went right, most neocon recruits were lifelong conservatives. So it isn’t reliable to say that if someone today is a neocon, that they were once a Democrat.
And indeed, MAGA is anti-neocon. But I doubt Craig is MAGA. He’s pro Trump for utilitarian reasons, not MAGA delusions. Hence, he is more likely in the neocon camp (complete with, IMO, its top-down view of religion as a tool of control rather than something actually true).
MAGA has no such coherent notion.
First, domestically, they are fascist: they want more, not less, government control over society (hence they are suppressionists who want women’s rights removed as well as minorities suppressed, libraries censored, gay marriage ended, and trans identities outlawed; they are pro-tariffs and pro-regulation when it suits their aims).
Second, plenty of MAGA people are warhawks and support the funding and coercive use of the military, locally and abroad. Others are isolationists not because they hate war but because they don’t like spending money helping allies or corporations.
And Trump certainly is not MAGA by any of these metrics (he is pro-war, indeed pro genocide and pro war crimes, and pro-state-interference in literally every aspect of life). He is MAGA only by the standard of the actual incoherent views of actual MAGA voters.
Just look at his MAGA platform. Which he has genuinely stuck to as much as time and means allowed.
There have never been any tricks. Every crime Trump has been prosecuted for he committed. And he has committed thousands of crimes since. Courts have declared hundreds of his actions criminal already and it’s not even one year in, and most of his crimes remain unadjudicated, from his mass murder of boaters without trial to the violations of legislative budget law that he hasn’t been sued over, which far outnumber the ones he has been, his violations of appointment law, his violations of state records acts, his corrupt receipt of foreign and domestic bribes, and his repeated violations of section 702. As well as repeated crimes of perjury and contempt of court. Trump is literally, objectively, the most criminal public servant (not just president) in the entire history of our nation.
Um. No. They are all failures often with no relevant skills or credentials. Research any one of them. You know, like Bessent for example. Or Patel. Or Kennedy. And so on.
And then deliberately chose Supreme Court justices to get it federally overturned.
It does not matter what mechanism you want to suppress human rights by. You are still against human rights.
Of course Trump actually is in favor of a federal ban. He just flipflopped and lied to get elected in 2020, knowing he could get his way by manipulating the court.
Meanwhile, there have been zero antifa attacks on Trump’s stormtroppers (antifa isn’t a thing) and relatively almost no attacks of any actual kind, but Trump has led at least three armed invasions of his own states so far, in violation of countless laws, with thousands of violent human rights violations. Declaring and going to war with the states is literally treason.
I must reiterate again there are some loud factions in the GOP, but those who make the decisions & in control of the party are socially, very moderate if not liberal. And to make a point here are the gay appointing to President Trump’s administration and his cabinet.
Trump nominated Ric Grenell for Amb to Germany & former Acting DNI (Tulsi Gabbard current Director of National Intelligence who oversees all of the other intelligence agents, including the CIA.)
Nominated Scott Bessent for Treasury Secretary. Married to a man with two adopted children. Appointed Tammy Bruce for State Dept Spox; Nominated Bill White for Amb to Belgium; And as a bonus, President Trump hosted a gay wedding at Mar A Lago.
The point is the hysterical left-wing Media has no idea what’s going on and if they do, they don’t want you to know how truly moderate and common sense the Trump administration is.
The members of the Biden administration who Weaponized the government broke in numerable laws to prevent their political enemies, primarily Trump and Republicans from even running for Office. This included more than 500 secret subpoenas to wire tap phones, and spy on completely benign organizations. The most remarkable part of the Democrats attempt to destroy Trump by taking down supporters was they found nothing of any consequence and nearly all of the charges and convictions against President Trump have been overturned by the United States Supreme Court as basically ridiculous.
A “constitutional Republic“ or a democracy regardless of the political party in charge will not last long de-evolve into a corrupt dictatorship. Somebody has to clean it up and fix. The laws to keep such weaknesses in our constitution, resulting in massive corruption and weaponization in the government have to be rectified… but it won’t be the Democrats who’ve gone completely around the bend. Just listen to James Carville and Congressman, John Fetterman, and recently Van Jones said after listening to Mamdani’s speech on election night “Mamdani is no longer the friendly guy people thought they were electing.“ He’s come out full Fidel Castro. From my point of view, it was predictable because having worked in Central and South America watched communist politicians, run for office, promising the world, etc., the second they are elected the dictator takes over & everything soon turns to shit and Mamdani is predictable. And the new communist, Muslim mayor will fail. And that too is predictable.
The US is now $35 trillion in debt and there is no one but a cabinet of experts “working billionaires” and not the academic nitwits who pontificate from a university, but I’ve never never made any money themselves are actually ever had a real job … have been called upon to fix it by President Trump.
What surprises many people as how President Trump comes to a decision. he doesn’t wake up one morning and think Will G I’ll make these peoples suffer and these other people get rich because they’re my buddies. Obama did that and Hillary.. people around Trump know how his style ultimately says he “makes decisions using an orchestra of opinions, sometimes purposely choosing people in the Orchestra with extreme oppositions to each other. Because it’s been said he “lets them fight it out, because in that way, he gets the best information possible & not just “clever sounding fixes“ meant to stroke his ego, but fail if put into practice.
These round table contest between differing opinions regarding policy Is brutal for some who have participated, but but the decisions that come out are actually pretty good… and there many indications that the economy our borders, the massive criminal control of our cities, & the decrepit state of our DEI military“ is being improved.
TDS -“Trump derangement syndrome” is real, and the Democrat party and their little toadies in the left-wing media were so successful in portraying President Trump as the most evil human being on the planet, a Nazi, Hitler incarnate, who was going to set up concentration camps and put Democrats in prison, etc., etc.— that they still cannot to this day even with all the improvements either do the research themselves or have any doubt that Trump still thinks of himself as “king.”
But if Trump was king, there would’ve been no government shut down and Democrats would’ve been disbanded as the most criminal corrupt political party in US history, which it is absolutely going to turn out to be. Furthermore, if you are king, you certainly would not allow protesters to march in front of the White House, right where you live ,would you?
Democrats, who still believe in democracy and a fair and honest government have to either somehow wrest control from the radicals or start a new party, because this country needs a two-party system. “Power corrupts, and total power corrupts absolutely,“ and the only way to keep total power from being in the hands of just one group is for both groups to have fair and honest political standards and let the people decide with honest elections that can stand up to scrutiny.., which unfortunately the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to prevent. They have to cheat to win and they know it.
You are doing it again, Diana. See my other comment.
You are saying things that are either easily found to be false or aren’t relevant to any point you are supposed to be making.
I am not going to hold your hand through this. You need to do better. You need to do better.
To learn how to fact-and-logic check yourself so as not to keep making torrents of mistakes like this please follow my advice in:
The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking
And:
A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research
The President himself is as fascist as can possibly come in the present American context. How can the mainstream, which is bending the knee to him, possibly be liberal, in any sense of the word? This is just bizarre extreme reality denial under word games.
Trump surrounded himself with liars, delusionists and idiots who wanted to destroy the cabinet they were in.
The neocons were overwhelmingly lifelong Republicans, indeed going back to Reagan.
This history is nonsense, and reads like Trumpist propaganda.
Curious what your position is on the Genocide or lack thereof. I’d be interested in your thoughts and source material.
That won’t be relevant here (perhaps more relevant as a question in comments on one of my political articles; see “politics” in the category dropdown menu, right margin).
But in general I agree with this, this, this, and this.
Israel was already on a genocide when they directly targeted Gaza’s entire agriculture for destruction. It’s only escalated from there.
Hamas much has used every civilian area of Gaza to launch their attacks on Israel. There is no civilian areas including the agricultural areas. Also has used civilians as Shields. They’ve done this since the beginning of wars. This is not new information..
Hamas also hijacks everyone of the trucks coming in from the US, Europe, the Red Cross, international Red Cross etc to feed the Hamas terrorist. When Israel try to protect it shipments of food into Gaza, they were attacked by him HAMAS who also killed the civilians TO PROTECT THE TRUCKS.
Could someone can tell me why Hamas is not mentioned in any of these dialectics? All I hear is how Israel is committing genocide, but not a word about Hamas launching thousands of missiles using money that they could use to feed the civilians. Not one word how Hamas built compounds and tunnels underneath hospitals and refugee camps. There’s not one word about Hamas using civilians as Shields, which is gone on for as long as this war. Why is that? How does Hamas get away with committing genocide against their own people, but Israel
trying to defend itself is committing genocide?
and there are consequences when you attack another country. Just remember that the people in Gaza voted 91% in favor of HAMAS and would do so again today. You don’t get to attack another country and then expect the other country to not strike back with everything they’ve got to defend themselves.
Palestine is not a country nor is Gaza, it is a geographic area. It did not & does not have an official government.
Gaza was originally owned by Egypt who signed it over to Israel. Why? Because Egypt kicked out the Palestinians because the Palestinian refugees war wrecking havoc on Egypt, and Egypt did not want to become radical but stay within the sphere of Western Europe and moderate Islam. (I was in Egypt after the Russians left, and the Egyptians learned their lessons about radical groups, destroying tourism and the nation’s economic, security and income.)
Palestinians are persona non grata in every single country they’ve been refugees because they attack the leaders and try to take the country over. King Hussain of Jordan before he died had over 22 attempted assassination by the Palestinians.
Palestinians are not allowed to immigrate to Saudi Arabia or any other country in the Middle East including Qatar who provides financing for HAMAS. Palestinians are not nice people. They were primarily known as nomadic camel train robbers and hijackers before the English began creating territorial lines for the purpose of signing oil contracts with different warlords and sheiks.
That’s all false, Diana. You’re spewing Israeli propaganda. You might want to see to that.
You should be an independent critical thinker. Not a gullible replicator of genocidal disinformation agents.
First of all: All I ever hear about is Hamas. Not Israel. Even from liberals. So the idea that no one is talking about Hamas is just delusion.
Second: The reason why rational people in the West don’t focus on Hamas is so simple that it is staggering it has to be explained to you.
Hamas sucks. That’s wholly irrelevant to what’s happening. And it’s a direct result of Israel’s expansionism and murder, discrediting and destroying every organization (especially the PLO) that has ever been a serious negotiating party. Hamas are now the people fighting to keep Palestine alive. Do people fighting for their lives often become nasty and have some really extreme ideologies? Yes. That’s no reason to embrace them being sent to the gas chambers.
Israel has a duty to comply with international law and stop doing what it is doing. Hamas has the same duty. But Israel is an actual state actor, and one that is heavily funded and dependent on foreign power. We can leverage Israel to change far more than we can Islamists.
Then there are interesting questions about how to undo the damage Israel has done when the negotiating partner they have to deal with is unfortunately awful. But much harder peace treaties have been done before. In any case, Palestine has a right to national self-determination, no matter how little you like their potential government.
William Lane Craig is one of the biggest liars I have ever witnessed in a debate at any time.
I am pretty sure that’s correct. I have accumulated examples of that.
And so clearly a liar both because he has had trivial errors pointed out to him and he says them again in the next debate (to the point that one of the reason Carroll trounced him was that Carroll just looked at his script and practiced – meaning he’s a lazy liar who didn’t even have backup lies ready to go, something even neo-Nazis I’ve talked to have managed to do better than) and because almost everything he says is based on extreme sophistry. That kind of sophistry can only be done by the dishonest or massively delusional, and since he created a lot of it, it’s clearly the dishonesty that is operant.
Any claim by Wilson seems to collapse under the universal, complete failure by those in government who advocate the position to apply any of the precepts their religion claims to promote. It matches claims that communism leads to a more just society: its advocates can only say that it has not actually ever been tried.
That’s the distinction: we’ve tried Christianity, we haven’t tried all possible ways of achieving socialism.
We’ve also tried several models of socialism that are working reasonably well. And we did that in just 200 or so years of trying.
There has never been a societal Christian system that ever worked well. And it’s had 2000 years of test runs. And entirely is based on the assertion that it’s divinely inspired. So it should have performed better than socialism, and a lot faster.
An excellent point, with the proviso that I think “socialism” is only useful when defined as “worker’s control of the means of production”… but even that has been tried, and has had some successes, despite far, far more serious actual opposition.
Total socialism would be workers owning all the means of production, but partial socialism has workers owning key sectors or competitive portions of them (e.g. national healthcare is essentially a citizen-owned collective of medical care production; same with public roads, public utilities, the post office, and so on).
But yes, UBI and medical insurance subsidies, for example, are technically not socialism by that definition. But most people colloquially understand any redistribution of wealth to be socialism, and such would that be under that definition. Semantics is more about what people more readily understand when communicating and less about scientific dialect.
As long as a popular definition is not incoherent or misleading it’s fine. But it’s also worth pointing out the technical language in the science of econ and polisci so as to prevent cross-domain confusion.
It’s a semantic discussion I do end up having not for ideological reasons but pragmatic ones. “Socialism” as “government intervention” is both ideologically well-poisoned and nonsensical because every government ever protected the poor and interfered in “property rights”. It thus ends up being both useless (since all governments are socialist to some measure by this poisoned definition), misleading (because it ignores the importance of liberty and autonomy in actual socialist thought), and ideologically contaminated (because people will shriek about any policy they don’t like as “socialist” while defending all of their statist policies).
Obviously sometimes one just has to concede to the definition and try to make it as useful as possible. And at that point, it is useful to point out that the right-wing are as “socialist” as anyone else… just for rich white Christian men.
Except we should be defending socialism not hiding the word because they vilify it. That lets the liars win.
You can’t fight a battle when you surrender every position to the enemy.
We need to do both. But that requires disentangling their irrational fears. They think that improving Medicaid will lead to gulags. It’s vital to say both “Medicaid isn’t worker’s control of the means of production, so even if you’re uncomfortable with the latter, it’s not the former” and “Worker’s control of the means of production isn’t gulags”.
All true, but you’re already at a level above 80% of the populace, who do not even know what “worker control of the means of production” is or that it has anything to do with socialism, communism, or even Marxism. They think “Stalinism” when they hear Marxism; they have no conception of what it has to do with “production” or “workers.” They hear “you’ll take all my stuff away and give it to lazy people” when you say “communism,” not “I will become part owner of the company I work at, with a vote and profit sharing.”
And they hear “there will be longer wait times and poorer outcomes” when they hear “Medicare for All,” which is an outright lie (all universal healthcare systems outperform our “free market” system in wait times, cost, and outcomes) and now the GOP is trying to get them to hear “illegal immigrants will get free health care at my expense” (which isn’t true in any other universal care system on the planet). They have no conception of worker ownership at all (which isn’t what MfA would produce; it’s closer to the NHS in the UK but not exactly even there), or it having anything to do with what they’ve been gullibly made afraid of.
So, yes, it’s worth spreading more understanding of all this. But that’s a lot of work, which most people avoid. So most people who read or hear words like “socialism” won’t be on the end of that learning curve but not even on it.
So we have to take that into account in our discourse. Correcting this (getting people on that learning curve) is worthwhile. But most people aren’t there. And so when engaging “most people,” we have to operate on the assumption that they haven’t even started it, and won’t give us the time of day to start them on it (most, if we try, they will roll eyes and check out), so we can’t count on being able to do an hour of adult education with them before we let them read or hear words like “socialism.” We have to operate in most cases with the learning they have, and work by small moves toward any other outcome.
The reason why I like to correct it to the worker’s control of the means of production (sometimes) is that the reframing can actually not only shock someone into realizing that they’ve made a bunch of very silly assumptions, but also because it counters a perception that really can be found among people that lefties are only fake pro-working class (thus combating the fascist propaganda on this topic). By reminding people that, no, the goal was always to allow workers to be satisfied producers rather than just letting people be better consumers, the conversation can be useful and not fall into the ruts.
Sometimes, of course, it’s critical to ram through the anti-welfare attitudes, which are themselves rooted in racism, misogyny, etc., which act as a protective shell against class politics.
Indeed. That’s all good practice and I encourage it. It is just, as you note, work. And so isn’t something that can be deployed most of the time.
It’s like street epistemology: sounds great, until you realize it can’t be scaled. To work, street epistemology requires the inefficient exercise of one-on-one interaction with someone already willing to devote that much time to engaging with you (which is almost no one and thus a selection effect). You can’t change millions of minds that way.
So, street epistemology isn’t “bad.” It’s good for its use case. It just can’t work at scale and so we need a different strategy there.
Thus, bringing this back, culture jamming people about what Marx really meant is worthwhile. It just can only operate in limited use cases. It doesn’t operate at scale. At scale, we are stuck with existing misunderstandings of these words that we have to work with, because we either have no access or too little time or word count (to maintain attention spans) to correct it before communicating something.
In the proverbial sense: it’s easier to wear shoes than pave the earth with leather. We still pave. It’s just, most of the time we have to wear shoes.
I look forward to this debate. Btw, I recently had a podcast discussion with the Freethinker host Daniel Sharp ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoGN-oiXnbM ) on my book ‘Bible Stories: Fact, Fiction & Fantasy in Scripture’ (Icon) and we debated the ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins etc. I am an atheist, and discuss why in the final chapter of my book, but don’t see it as an evangelical calling as they do and I critique the arguments of Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens and Harris. Sharp and I agreed on other things, however, including the paucity of evidence for the historical Jesus.
Andrew Wilson and Daniel Haqiqatjou have debated before on the question of child marriage which is normative in Islam ie no minimum age. It really got most distasteful towards the end
That’s not really true. Whatever fringe view Haqiqatjou holds, conservative Islam sets age of consent same as Talmudic Judaism: 12 (liberals), 7 (conservatives). Yes. That’s in the Talmud. Ancient and medieval Christianity does not seem to have had any different a view.
Most Islam is not that backward, however. For example, Iran sets law at 13. But Tunisia at 20. And so on. In short, actual Muslim societies are pretty much just like Jewish and Christian societies (e.g. child marriage is still a thing in Christian communities even in the U.S. so if we want to “cherry pick” who counts, Islam can be no more accused of this than Christianity can; whereas if we measure by population and national majorities, without secular intervention, Islam sets age of consent no differently than Christianity).
that article says there is no minimum age for marriage in islam – it even quote normative islam.
Quranic legality is found at 65.4
It then conflates it with sexual relations.
Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and and consummated the marriage when she was nine (being physically able to – psychological doesn’t get a look in).
(Al-Mughni)
Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), who is also known as Averroes, said:
(Bidayat al-Mujtahid 3/34)
Imām al-Nawawī (d. 1277), who was one of the leading jurists of his time, said:
(Sharh al-Nawawi ‘ala Muslim 9/206)
Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 1071), who was the most knowledgeable scholar in spain of his time, said:
(Al-Tamhid 40/12)
Ibn al-Mundhir (d. 930), who was a leading scholar during his time, said:
(Al-Ijma’ 78)
Al-Baghawi (d. 1122), who was called “Reviver of the Sunna” (Muhyi as-Sunna) and “Pillar of the Religion” (Rukn al-Din) and more, said:
(Sharh al-Sunnah 9/37)
Al-Maziri (d. 1141), a prominent scholar of the maliki school, said:
(Ikmal al-Mu’lim 4/572)
Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240), who was was given the title “The Greatest Shaykh” (Shaykh al-Akbar), said:
(Aridat al-Ahwadhi 5/22)
Ibn Hubayra (d. 1165), who was the vizier of the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtafi, said:
(Ikhtilaf al-A’imma 2/123)
14
Modernist Muslims who are embarrassed at this attempt to revise Aisha’s age – but it’s a futile effort easily refuted:
None of that is historically credible sourcing. But it does reflect what the Muslims making up or gullibly retelling those stories believed.
Which is all pretty much exactly the same thing the Talmudic Rabbis believed: age 7 might be okay, but age 12 is better, because grass-play-ball.
This thus just reflects barbaric medieval thinking altogether and not anything Quranic or even properly normative (since there was widespread disagreement). 65.4 only references divorce, not sex, and could thus encompass betrothals; it thus does not entail consummations. It makes no pronouncement about that. So there is no “normative” rule about this in Islam at all. It’s all up to local custom and temporal assumption (as in the Talmud).
That’s true – quran 65 discusses the waiting period – ‘iddah’ – for female divorcees. One such category of a divorcee (verse 4) is ‘those (females) who have not menstruated (yet)’
Virtually all exegetists and jurists take this to mean minor girls.
Modernists attempt to revise Aishah’s age at marriage (at 6 years of age) and consummation (at 9) but it doesn’t really wash.
https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-age-of-aisha-ra-rejecting-historical-revisionism-and-modernist-presumptions
But that’s the thing. That claim about consummation isn’t in the Quran. The Quran does not mention that. So it includes betrothals, not just consummated marriages. It therefore doesn’t say anything about having sex with pre-pubescent girls.
As such, it’s just like every other ancient text from betrothal cultures: leaving it to local custom, not religious dictate. The Hadith may be different, as the Talmud is (the OT also never says anything about this), but since they are the same (in the Talmud, the debate is “7 or 12” or grass-play-ball, and that’s that), there is no way to criticize Islam without also criticizing Judaism for teaching exactly the same thing.
It’s worse that the “age at marriage and consummation” stuff is all in myth anyway, where mythical reasoning can prevail, e.g. Aishah could be imagined a miraculous prodigy and thus not representative of anyone else (the same way the toddler Jesus was imagined a relentlessly mass-murdering child prodigy in the Infancy Gospel and this was considered heroic—but only for him, not anyone else).
Hello Dr. Carrier,
I found you blog after having been away from your content for a while. I think the first thing I read by you was a post entitled, “What an atheist ought to stand for.” I think that raised the ire of some of the non-believers who think there is no such thing as objective morality, or something like that (it seems like they feel offended and try to cancel you every few years).
Since finding your blog again, I have been reviewing a variety of posts. The most interesting topic to me is still how humans can and do use our rationality to create optimal ethical systems. The next most interesting topic is the mythicism of Jesus.
On the one hand, I have to commend your energy in answering some of the comments over pages and pages of digital text.
On the other hand, I have to ask: Why do you waste your time?
The second question applies to these upcoming debates.
Why do you waste your time debating people you know for a fact have no interest in engaging with the topic honestly? Your comments about someone named “Wilson” show that you know he’s going to rely on a point of view you have defeated many times already – that it’s OK for the elites to lie to the unwashed masses to make them be moral.
(“I’ve come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways.”)
There are two reasons I can see to engage in these kinds of “debates.” One is to get yourself some air time and perhaps bring some folks to your other content. I don’t believe that there is a payoff worth the effort and the time you have to spend with these idiots. I can’t prove it in this short comment, but my belief is based on the age-old marketing adage:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
From my POV, you produce valuable content in the topics you write about, so I would encourage you to leverage your time so that you can produce more of the valuable content, and spend less time engaged with people who don’t give a s*t what you have to say and never will.
The second reason I can see why you may want to do these things it you think they are fun and you get to travel on someone else’s nickel. I do this sometimes with timeshare offers.
I suppose the YouTube “Debate Bro” industry is useful for helping some folks monetize their channels: After every debate, people can create a few hundred hours of content where they clip and splice the original debate to make their favorite person seem smart and the others seem dumb. Professor Dave is pretty good a making five more videos out of one argument he has with Dr. James Tour (“Mister Farina!!”), for example.
My other question is: Do you create any kinds of visualizations to compare your ideas against those of folks with whom you have academic differences, such as Bart Ehrman?
In reading some of the Jesus as myth content, I see that there has been a lot of back and forth between you two. It’s all text-based, or verbal in videos (which is worse), that I could find. I would think that flow charts would show quite quickly whose POV leads to rational conclusions and whose leads to intellectual dead ends. No one needs to just assert it – you can show it.
Maybe you do this in your published papers or books, none of which I have read, and maybe this blog is not the most important outlet for you content, so it’s just going to be typing. If you do diagram your arguments, please let me know where I can see those charts.
With my Project Management and Quality Control training and experience, I have found that discussions gain a lot of clarity when we create GANTT charts, flowcharts, fishbone diagrams, mind maps, MECE diagrams, etc.
Making flowcharts and other dependency charts are the most effective ways I have found to determine if someone is arguing from their conclusions and ignoring contradicting evidence and arguments. I encourage you to give it a try. Maybe you can get an AI to do it (wink).
I’m feeling frustrated about how ineffective the people on the “right side of history’ seem to be these days. Please understand that this is meant as a suggestion to free up your time and give you more leverage. It’s the Pareto Principle. The difficult part is finding the 20% of effort that produces 80% of value and honing in on that.
Thanks for reading.
It isn’t wasted.
(A) I make a living doing this.
(B) Most of my work connects to affairs that directly affect human lives and thus I am generating a collective good (making people smarter and more critically minded and less bigoted and foolish, and better informed and more capable, helps achieve all valuable political and social goals).
(C) The rest of my work connects indirectly. The role of a historian is to be the memory cells of society so we don’t get Societal Alzheimers or Societal Derangement. All my historical work serves this end. I explain the social function (and thus social value and necessity) of historians in a peer reviewed article on the point reproduced in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ. For philosophy, see my notes on Is Philosophy Stupid.
(D) And all of it gives my life meaning through progress in knowledge, and sharing that progress (including correcting false knowledge). We are how the universe knows itself. See my series on The Meaning of Life for perspective.
Because I am good at it, someone needs to do it, and I was paid a lot of money to. But above all it is a venue for spreading truth against lies. Access to the audience is the only merit to such a debate.
The first point means only those who are good at it should be doing it.
The second point does not mean we should always do it (a few times is enough, to create a referenceable and thus influencing record of countering delusional or fascist tactics and lies—so, for example, I doubt I’ll ever debate Wilson again, or very many fascists at all; there needs to be some value added to each occasion).
The third point is the only reason I’m taking this specific assignment (I only do live debates now for a lot of money because that limits opponents to only those, or whose patrons, who are genuinely serious enough to pay its actual cost).
And the fourth point is the value added, which is what also has to be weighed against material and social costs (including emotional labor and overplatforming). Every debate is the persuasion and inoculation of an audience, not an opponent. Case in point: all my opponents are platformed whether I am there or not. Better me. When I’m well paid and there is something left to gain (and it’s not just a repeat of old hat).
You’d have to be more specific. If you are asking “do I sometimes have slides with my talks on various subjects,” yes. Some of those are housed here (they are linked from articles discussing them). Most are just in the recordings (there are hundreds on YouTube). But I won’t be using visuals at MDD. In most cases it distracts rather than adds.
I can’t help you if you need arrows rather than words.
Every competent reader does fine with my Recap article. Almost everything else is just fluff with minimal added value. In fact it entails substantially less information and reasoning and is thus less effective at penetrating doubt and resistance, or even informing the interested.
Nothing in the historicity debate can be “shown” with visuals. Visuals are assertions. Showing means proving. That can only be done with words (descriptions and citations of data and lines of reasoning). That’s why all professional history consists of articles and monographs. Not cute flowcharts void of the actual detail we are interested in.
The problem is not lack of flowcharts. It’s delusion (a mental illness), cognitive bias (a permanent neurological defect of all human beings), and disinformation operations (post-truth machinery). Which can only be affected by information and cognitive dissonance. Flowcharts can accomplish neither.
People need to want to learn (cognitive dissonance can sometimes impel them to, and that requires substantive information, not colored assertions on a screen) and then they need to learn (which requires teaching, not art displays).
See the Critical Thinking category of my dropdown menu top right margin.
Also, since the time of the “Final Experiment,” where Will Duffy was willing to pay for “flerfs” and “globetards” to travel to Antarctica to put up or shut up – I have completely changed my attitude towards “debates.” Such disputes only matter if both sides are willing to risk something important to show their argument is correct.
Nowadays, in the more and more rate instances when I talk with god-botherers, I cut to the chase, “If you can produce a god, any god, I will believe in it and tell everyone I was wrong and a god exists. If you can’t will you stop believing and tell everyone you were wrong and no gods exist?” They always walk away.
“Always” is the wrong finding. I find my debates have changed minds quite a lot. The rate would be around 5% or more based on the number of people who have come to me years later to let me know, and the expected number of people like them who didn’t take that step. A net 5% compound interest rate always wins long term. The largest swing in a debate I ever saw (something like an 80% flip) was the Intelligence Squared debate with Fry and Hitchens.
So, no, debate has effects. Sustained debate and exposure more so.
It can’t just be an idle sentence.
If you want to convert people to reason, you need a sustained body of information and motivating ways to get them to read it.
In my view, ’twould be likely that Inspiring Philosophy would bring up mythicism, as IP likes to argue towards what he believes—or pretends to believe—the consensus to be. The consensus is against Mythicism, and, in my view, Jones is likely to work it into the debate, at some point. I also think that he will argue from idealism or “quantum woo” towards the existence of his god, as he has an entire playlist on this on his channel, and has even gone on other channels to discuss idealism. Given that idealism often crops up on this blog in your crosshairs, and given that you consider it to be “a dead theory” then this ought to be an interesting debate in the likely event Jones employs argumentum ad quantum or argumentum ad idealismum. From “proving” that the idealistic, or quantum god exists, then for Jones, it is only a hop skip and a jump for him to prove that Jesus is real. This is where mythicism is likely to come up, in my view: when Jones attempts to connect the quantum/idealistic god to the god of Christianity.
That would be a bad move on his part (as it wastes clock, which only benefits me).
In my experience usually when the debate is “God” smart apologists avoid getting into the weeds of defending the Bible or even the specifics of Christianity. At best he might squeeze in the resurrection, which would afford him time to maybe make Craig’s mistake and try poisoning the well with a snide remark about mythicism. But that wouldn’t go anywhere because I’ll dismiss it in a sentence as irrelevant and move on (and if he uses it fallaciously, I’ll score points with the audience by calling out the well poisoning tactic as that of someone losing an argument and not someone who actually has a case).
Do you think I’m arguing against evolution? It might sound strange, but I believe, not ironically, that it’s the best thing theists can have.
How can I think something about you when I don’t even know who you are?
Did you post here previously under a different moniker?
Or did you get lost and meant to post this comment on someone else’s blog?
Do you happen to know when your debates will drop for us non-MDD members? Should we expect follow-up summary articles?
Thank you for asking. I do not know about the videos (keep your eye on the MDD site I guess?). But I have a post-game analysis planned here. I’ve had a lot to do of late (work and household), and next week is Thanksgiving planning as well. So I can’t guarantee when I’ll get it out. But my hope is before the end of this month.
While we wait for the recordings to drop, and before your review, in a word, were you happy or disappointed in how the debates went?
The IP debate went well and was only 60% frustrating and unproductive. The AW debate went “okay” and was 100% frustrating and unproductive.
These are defects in oral debate as a process in and of itself (and why I no longer do live debates unless very well paid). But IP reminded me of what public debate discourse used to be like twenty years ago, while the AW debate reminded me of how completely public debate discourse has degraded to the point of being utterly useless.
I’ll be looking forward to your write up. While I’ve not had the time to watch the upload of AW, I did give the comments a glance and of course couldn’t tell if they presaged a fumbled debate or were just cheerleading for AW.
Good to hear the IP debate at least led to something.
My assessment is now up.
A very informative book on God and Evolution.:Evolving Out of Eden by Robert M Price and Edwin Suominen.More thorough than you might imagine and fun to read.
I’m not familiar with it so I can’t comment on its use or merit.