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Dinesh D’Souza, Christian and best-selling author, will face off against Tufts professor, author, and atheist Daniel Dennett in a debate on the existence of god. The resolution for the debate will be as follows: “God is a manmade invention.” Daniel Dennett will be arguing the affirmative, and Dinesh D’Souza the negative
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If God made man in his own image, then asking how big God's cock is would be a legitimate question.
Why does Dennett even bother? It's like trying to reason with the psychotic….
I suppose the point of public debates with religious nuts like D'Souza isn't to convince them (a hopeless cause if there ever was one) so much as to show others that there is, in fact, a response to their assertions, and what that response might look like.
Christians love to tell us that before the 10 commandments it was chaos. Do they really think people said "Thou shalt not kill? Wow! what a brilliant idea, we hadn't thought of that". When the Romans came to Britain, they commented on how people of different religions worshiped peacefully at the same shrines. Once in control, the christians systematically persecuted, murdered and burnt those who weren't christian.
Yet they claim a 'good act' is a 'christian thing to do' etc.
its not like trying to reason with the psychotic it is reasoning with the psychotic. but until denesh does something violent he is allowed to walk and debate among us
Wow. Being a follower of GOD (Jesus) is only about FAITH, nothing more nothing less. We all have faith in something, Choose wisely. Faith in nothing is still faith that there is nothing more than we have in this life. Are you that sure of yourself?
Irrational faith is what's bad.
Dinesh D'Souza : what a nut!
Dinesh's response to the scandinavian question was the most absurd dodge ever! Did he really think that qualified as a satisfactory answer?
Dinesh D'Souz is so annoying!
Why were so many people sitting and listening to him wasting their time?
Daniel Dennett should have been the first to have walked out.
if resemblance is a better word than image.
Dinesh is kind of a jerk, atheists should be allowed to explore religion in a secular way.
6:20 Hey Dinesh, equality is not a Christian idea. You give Christian apologetics a bad name.
Why bother? Probably because the goal of debate isn't to "convert" your opponent to your side. It's to open up a dialogue and it's usually the audience/viewers that takes the most away from it. I can assure you, many atheist lost their faith due to see how the fallacies of religion break down in the face of logic and reason. Debates are a great way of demonstrating this. Dennett, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc. never debate to convert their opponent; it's to inform those watching.
ALL faith is irrational. If you have a rational basis for something, you don't take it on faith.
No, we all don't have faith in something. Rejecting a claim because said claim hasn't met its burden of proof is not the same as taking it on faith. NO ONE has faith in "nothing" so you can't use that fallacious premise to prop up the second part of your argument. Most people who are honest don't make a claim to knowledge about what happens when we die. What we say is that those making claims about it (especially those taking it on faith) make assertions without any kind of proof or reason.
Why are you a follower of the Abrahamic ideas of god and not all of the hundreds of other religions in this world? You talk about choice, did you research them all and then "choose" based on their relative merits? You're undoubtedly the religion of your parents and/or the community you were raised in. If you were born into a Buddhist household or a Hindu one, you wouldn't be talking about faith in Jesus.
True.
What can one do but shake one's head at such nonsense ?Superstition/theism is and always will be a crutch and a comfort blanket for those who lack mental fortitude and the honesty to find the truth rather than the lazy arrogance of ignorance. Goodbye
1:37 Sits down like he won. pfft. His heart is beating so fast.
Dinesh is a delusional annoying ignorant talking shit
If we're created in the image of god why aren't we all invisible?
What if these atheist speakers and these Christian speakers got together to sell books?
I hope christianity dies out soon
If goodness was sufficient then why would man create God? Thus the argument is invalid.
History alone shows how good mankind has been to others. We had over 200 million killed in this century alone. We promote a women's right to practice slavery by saying her unborn child is her property to do with as she pleased and we pay for it. So there is 60-70 million more in the US alone in this century. I'm not even counting the destruction, lose of animals, and suffering all these caused.
If atheist continue down this road they will be extinct because they choose to worship themselves and the creation because they thought they had a right too!
So my prediction is atheism will be extinct in the next 20-30 years. They don't procreate for one, one reason they recruit other people's children. You can't live for yourself and you can't have it all either. I'm even surprised they move out of their parents basement as they can't support even themselves. Which is why Scandinavia had a high rate of atheist. The government protects them from having to experience failure and self reliance in ones self and others and their taxes are sky high to do it.
Wow, D'Souza is giving a good philosopical and historical case for christianity.
goodness: it's super…. it's natural….. it's just not supernatural 🙂
D'Souza and the theists get a lot of mileage out of the fact that god can't be disproved. They take this fact and run with it do nothing but beg the question (mainly, that the laws of the universe are too complex to be randomly created).
When D'Souza uses the analogy of the author of the novel to explain god's relation to his creation, he misses a very important point. The author of the novel created characters like him of herself. Even if the author is a highly moral person and creates depraved characters, they are still derived from the author's experiences and understanding of human nature. What did D'Souza's god base his creation on? If D'Souza and the theists are so amazed that the laws of the universe must all be just the way they are for life to exist and nothing like this existed before, then where did god get the idea? And why did it take him billions of years to make creatures (human beings) in his image? According to the "wisdom" of Christianity (all three Abrahim religions), we are god-like, just at a lower level as D'Souza explains our yearning to ascend to higher levels. Really? Our goal is to ascend toward god? Put aside the fact that is more question begging and ask why god created all sorts of creatures before us, that are unlike us in that they are simply in a food chain that, compared with our experience and "purpose" seems absurd and pointless. If humans see themselves as so different from every other life form on the planet because of the way our consciousness has evolved, isn't it far more likely that this experience of being different (or the awareness of it) explains our quest for meaning? The explanations from the existing religions (many died out and others evolved/morphed into others) are amusing, but still absurd when asked to be taken literally. Of course, we can explain and contextualize any story in a way that gives it another literary "life". Literary scholars could find profound meaning in The Cat in the Hat if they wanted because they are trained to do so. Thus, D'Souza and his ilk, trained in deconstructing texts and employing logic skills (faculties that exists in no other creature to the degree it does in us), are really literary critics. The analogy that D'Souza uses comparing works of fiction to religious texts is a good one, he should keep his criticism at that level. That is essentially what Dennett proposes. Teach the religions as myths, as part of our cultural history. We don't need Hamlet or Othello to be historically true stories in order to appreciate them. We don't need Shakespeare's writing to be the only inspired word that human beings have ever had. In fact, any retelling of a story is somewhat fictionalized. A past event can never be recreated in perfect replication to the original. We have imaginations, faulty memory. Getting stuck on the Bible or any particular religious text as the word of the creator is absurd as well as an extremely boring idea. Who reads the Bible for wisdom these days (not that there isn't wisdom in it)? Most people would rather read Shakespeare and any number of philosophers, poets and prose writers who write with the benefit of having read other literature, studied other disciplines. If the best god could do was to inspire the works of the Bible and other religious texts. (Maybe the true word of god was in one of the religions that died out a long time ago. The masses have bad taste. Look at what sells in the cinema. Why expect the "correct" religion to have survived culturally?)
D'Souza is a boring pedant. This is the type of personality that appreciates religion in the way he does. Isn't this one common thread the fundamentalists have — a lack of a sense of humor and a capacity for humility and self reflection? D'Souza worships "white" culture and is a "product" of the Christian religious tradition. Is that what god wants? Why did god put him in a non white culture? To lead his people to the true Christian religion? Haha! If so, god could presumably have made us all little Dinesh D'Souzas. Isn't that frightening? When you start unraveling this "god thread" any intelligent person with a sense of humor and a little education can see through it in a second. That is why, as Dennett points out, the only way we to keep this nonsense in the realm of belief or literal acceptance is to brainwash children. If there is one thing we know. human beings are really good at self deception and, as all the great stories tell us, this weakness will be our doom. Thanks for nothing but a laugh, Dinesh.
Bull. If god "dies", we'll go on living like we always have. Just like all the other gods Dinesh doesn't believe in.
the equality of men and women, the equality of the races, another Christian idea? No its not. If you go back to the texts that Christianity is based on, namely the new and old testaments, you find that women were basically the property of men, polygamy was normal, women's worth in shekels was less than a mans, women couldn't make vows on things because the men in their lives could abrogate it. And the old testament also says that Israel is a special race chosen by god, and that Israelites could buy their slaves from the heathen, namely, the non-jews. Dsouza should know better, as a professional debater, than this nonsense. But maybe it is his indoctrination that he can't shake from his mind that makes him believe the always-rightness of his religion, just like all religious people think their religion is right and perfect and never wrong.