Topic: Debate

[Weisshaupt]

What defines "good"?

If Not God? If Humanity is this bad WITH religion imagine  how bad would they be without it?

You could even begin by meeting him on his own ground...(in fact I think you should ALWAYS do this.. quoting scripture is not convincing to anyone without faith in it..and God is truth, and he is found there Always, no matter how the truth is arrived at or expressed. Scripture is NOT PROOF to anyone who doesn't believe, and you will loose ground and credibility if you attempt to use it in this  debate (as proof - as illustration its fine..) ) 

SO Accept for a moment his premise that there is no God  and Religion is just a  Tool used by mankind. Like any tool, it can be used for Good or for Evil, could it not? But if there is NO FORCE in the universe defining Good or Defining Evil, and such determination must be left to the individual , he must admit that there are no absolutes.

By teaching of a higher power- of a God with rules, of definitions of right and wrong, and having a society all following those rules you avoid the moral-relativism-free-for-all and  have a means to regulate and encourage "moral behavior" (however defined) and thus benefit all people living within that system by having a common set of rules that DO NOT rely on a the barrel of a gun to be enforced, but are obeyed because of a personal and deeply held belief in religious doctrine.
 Is that not for the "greater good"?  The wars that religions have been involved in, encouraged,  or have been the cause of, are simply the Macro version of the conflict that would occur between each and every human being if there were no religions to define and support a moral code within a society.  Given that religions reduce interpersonal conflict and violence within a society that (largely)  adheres to them, and that wars caused by religion usually have as their aim,  the imposition of that same moral system on a greater number of people which would then further reduce violence and interpersonal conflict in the long run,  would not the "greater good" dictate that a single system imposed by force be better for everyone? Would not a world entirely peopled with Jews, with Hindus, with Muslims, or with Christians be inherently more peaceful than a world of Atheist individuals all of whom believed themselves capable of laying down their own (and conflicting)  moral laws?    No human society can long endure without a shared moral system. Our country is proof of it as the conflict between liberals and conservatives - both with very different ideas of right and wrong,  demonstrates.

At some point he will likely  retreat to Spock's "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few" and as soon as he admits the principle of  "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz" ("The community comes before the individual") you remind him that philosophy was written around every Nazi coin and  that Hitler firmly believed killing all of the Jews was for the "greater good." and ask him to tell you by what principle or rule we can distinguish what he sees as "good" from what Hitler saw as "good" - there being no God, who can see all ends,  to help sort that out.

I think you could easily trap him in an " Ends Justify the means" statement where someone is harmed...
Is it right to deprive people of weapons (guns)   with which to protect themselves if on net it saves lives even if some people are harmed? Is it right to allow abortions as a separate and unique  human being is killed?  Is it right to force people to contribute or support causes which they find ( in contradiction to a majority) immoral or reprehensible (like abortion)?

Force him to admit that he feels a "majority opinion"  is the definition of "right" or "good"

You can then remind him that the Majority once felt enslaving Blacks to be "good" - not only for the society but for the blacks themselves.

From there I don't see where he could retreat to.  Maybe some statement about not doing "harm" to others, but having already admitted to a philosophy where the "ends  justify the means" - that harming some for the good of whole  is justified,  you go for the kill , point out the circular reasoning  and force him to admit that the principle difference between his ideas and those of Hitler is simply the difference between   of his OWN selfish desires, and his own selfish opinions, his own values,  and those of Hitler -- neither of which are universal,  and can only be imposed upon others at the point of a gun.

You can therefore then  return to the original question - "Does religion help more than it hurts?"
Obviously Religion benefits mankind EVEN IF we accept his premise that religions are entirely fictitious  stories used to justify the impositions of such moral systems - because the reduce intra-personal conflcit within a society without requiring  the use of force of arms.   When force of arms is used, its an abuse of the tool to be sure, but by his own JUDGEMENT, in which the ends justify the means, he cannot condemn the use of the tool in such a way, since his views of right and wrong are no more valid (or invalid)  than those of the next person.  If there is no God, then Might makes Right, and let the most powerful Religion win.

[Libertas]

Force him to admit that he feels a "majority opinion"  is the definition of "right" or "good"

You can then remind him that the Majority once felt enslaving Blacks to be "good" - not only for the society but for the blacks themselves.

Bam!

And yeah, you have to lead him in this direction gently and then come in hard and fast like a punch in the gut!   

There is also the issue that the majority of Germans thought Hitler was the answer too...which Weisshaupt also mentions.  And what despotic regime hasn't used the "might makes right" excuse?  What is good for the goose is good for the gander. 

[Pablo de Fleurs]

Good points, Weisshaupt - there must be a reference point from which to come...and it needs to be outside of ourselves because what starts out as well intentioned rapidly devolves into a statist mentality with men subjectively seeking greater power over their fellow man.

Thanks.

[Pablo de Fleurs]

So tonight I brushed up on String Theory, the Multiverse/Megaverse & 'The Landscape' (which is basically a catch all ginormous, galactic rug under which to sweep all improbability) - see something you like that doesn't work here...OR something you can't prove but desperately believe in??? Don't worry...'The Landscape MUST contain a Universe in which what you want...works or doesn't (depending upon your preference.

So it's the "throw more time and/or universes" at the problem until the language & infinitesimal-ness so garble & confuse...that most within the general population either don't care or are intimidated by the "science of it all."

But...getting back to what is 'good' - travel to Africa, where you'll find many cultures: some cultures honor their guests, others...eat them. Tell me, Mr. Atheist, sir...do you have a personal preference?? 

[AlanS]

..... travel to Africa, where you'll find many cultures: some cultures honor their guests, others...eat them. Tell me, Mr. Atheist, sir...do you have a personal preference?? 

Maybe he'd like some Tabasco?

[Alphabet Soup]

..... travel to Africa, where you'll find many cultures: some cultures honor their guests, others...eat them. Tell me, Mr. Atheist, sir...do you have a personal preference?? 

Maybe he'd like some Tabasco?

Mmmmmmm Tabasco, nectar of the gods. I buy directly from McIlhenny ;')

[Libertas]

..... travel to Africa, where you'll find many cultures: some cultures honor their guests, others...eat them. Tell me, Mr. Atheist, sir...do you have a personal preference?? 

Maybe he'd like some Tabasco?

Mmmmmmm Tabasco, nectar of the gods. I buy directly from McIlhenny ;')

I thought that was Shiner Bock?      

[AlanS]

..... travel to Africa, where you'll find many cultures: some cultures honor their guests, others...eat them. Tell me, Mr. Atheist, sir...do you have a personal preference?? 

Maybe he'd like some Tabasco?

Mmmmmmm Tabasco, nectar of the gods. I buy directly from McIlhenny ;')

I thought that was Shiner Bock?      

Has to be, my brotha!

[Pablo de Fleurs]

A new date of 2/01/15 has been established  the topic being "Is Christianity/Religion a Force for 'Good' in 2015?".

Matthew Parris is an atheist, homosexual journalist living in Africa. Yet his observances of the culture(s) there have prompted him to write this:

Matthew Parris: As an Atheist, I truly Believe Africa Needs God
By TIMES ONLINE | Added: Wednesday, 07 January 2009 at 7:00 PM

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. â??Privatelyâ? because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: â??theirsâ? and therefore best for â??themâ?; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the â??big manâ? and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? â??Because it's there,â? he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Debating rhetoric is one thing, logical devices another & metaphysical musings yet another. Real world observances on what impacts the reality of those suffering atrocities shucks it down to the cob. I continue to prepare & will be ready.
--------------------------------------
...and yet another atheist in my arsenal:

[Libertas]

"It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates."

Sure as heck doesn't work here on libiots, they view God as an impediment to their hedonistic impulses and look to undermine Him at every opportunity, but perhaps in Africa this will meet with more success, however, Africa has so many problems I am not sure there is time or resources enough to remake that continent, win a few more souls for God though never a bad thing in the interim.  Just sayin'...

Still, an interesting perspective of an open-minded person.

[Glock32]

I can tell you just from my own spiritual evolution (raised Baptist, then wandering as basically an agnostic for most of my 20s, to now returned to Christ) that a big epiphany for me was that not only can't I explain God or my faith in Him in terms of the material universe we occupy, but that I shouldn't. As it says in the Bible, "our ways are not His ways."

I used to think myself very clever by pointing out the apparent paradoxes, things like "well if the entire Earth was covered by water during the Great Flood, where did all that water go?"  I guess maybe with age comes a new sense of humility, because as I got into my 30s and found myself knowing something just wasn't right with my agnostic/secular disposition, and I again sought out God, I was struck with the realization that paradox does not disprove God, on the contrary, because from our limited ability to perceive existence God is paradox. God can make 2+2=5. That's my shorthand for the concept, anyway.

I'm no longer bothered by trying to fit God and the seeming impossibilities into the framework of this material universe, because this material universe accessible to our mortal perception is a grain of sand compared to the metaphysical universe that is necessarily inaccessible to our perception. I'm sure the atheists would call this obscurantism or some such, and they can think that if they want, though I hope they will at some point in their lives discover the need to seek something beyond the material universe.

[Pablo de Fleurs]

Update:

"One little atheist, read my blog a ton,   
Figured I would wupp his butt,
and then there were none."

Unfortunately…my atheist opponent has tucked tail & run. First he started umming & ahhing over the date – changing it twice, claiming previously scheduled debates (after he had committed to ours). Then, claiming a heavy school schedule, he bailed…saying he had numerous “friends” who would be happy to take his place…

…we (the pastor & I) contacted them all…nada.

Interestingly, our daughter takes virtually the same AP classes as does he...& isn't particularly overwrought by her schoolwork.

My blog has seen an uptick in traffic over the past 2 months – specifically hitting all the articles/posts having to do with lynchpin atheistic argumentation. When I met the young man (who is attending Brandeis University on a partial scholarship) and his father, I mentioned my blog & suggested tweaks for the topic, steering them towards a showdown on the good/evil metric and how to distinguish between the two based upon real world (Ontic) and supernatural referents.

My guess is that, after reading my blog posts, they figured that a loss in his debating career @ the hands of an evangelical Christian would be too embarrassing…and he & all his “friends” bailed.

So now we have a Want-Ad running….”Wanted: Atheist Unafraid of Their Own Worldview”.

 

[Libertas]

”Wanted: Atheist Unafraid of Their Own Worldview”

 

Good luck with that!

I bet ya get a lot of annonymous hate mail though!

[Weisshaupt]

Always cowards. They will never debate. I am not even sure they know how.
 
I used to participate in  a number of forums,  trying to meet them on their own ground, and not once in those ten years did any one of them respond directly to any point I made (unless it was truly in error, and Yes, I am fallible and that happened)  If they don't respond the only interpretation you can have is "victory"

Too bad though,  after agreeing to debate and you being so courteous as to blog about your argument in advance for him, he still tucks tail..

I was looking forward to the video.

[Libertas]

Just play the latest Call of Duty, it will better resemble the debate we finally get to have with all cowards.

[warpmine]

CRAP! I was so looking forward to the debate.

[Magnum]

Maybe the unbelievers are starting to understand just what astronomical odds they are looking at in trying to explain how the world was created and how we came to be by pure random chance.

Does Science Argue for or against God?

But I am not holding my breath............

[Weisshaupt]

Cowards

http://campusreform.org/?ID=6289

The free event has a Q&A portion concluding Adams’ talk, during which Marston, a biology and chemistry major, was hoping the other student organizations could participate.

“I had naively thought UNCW’s pro-choice student organizations would jump at any and every opportunity to participate in events on the topic of abortion,” Marston told Campus Reform in an interview. “Or at least, I thought they would be somewhat interested in having a platform to defend their views. If they believe so strongly that abortion is a woman’s right—why are they afraid to defend their belief?”

Marston said she was not surprised that the organizations declined to participate in the event as they have not extended invitations to any pro-life organizations while hosting pro-abortion events in the past.

“If Ratio Christi is the intolerant party, why will NARAL, PRIDE, and the WSSA not tolerate our personal invitations?” she said. “Why will they not tolerate our attempt to engage with them on a topic of mutual interest?”

[Libertas]

Of course we know why!

But this is exactly the time where it is fun to needle them about it!