This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
Perfect example of how one's humanity got sacrificed on the altar of religion. On the psychology of the matter I have but one thing to say: _Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development_ They speak of ultimate or absolute morality but fail to realize that their moral insight is *quite literally* comparable to that of an infant. They are stuck in level1/stage1 of moral development: Obedience and punishment orientation. Most children grow out of that phase by the time they are 5 or 6 years old and moves to level1/stage2. They suffer from the moral equivalent of a child with stunted growth due to severe malnourishment.
If we go right back to the start--human suffering began when we got kicked out of the Garden. So then was being kicked out of the Garden a good thing or a bad thing. Scripture intonates that it was a good thing because it would not have been good if we would have lived forever in our sinful state of being. So then, God's reaction (which resulted in human suffering) to our fallen state of being, was necessary in order to avoid an even worse consequence than our present suffering.
God is perfectly holy and He calls all people to be holy. He is not only jealous but perfectly jealous. Nations that practice idol worship, divination, witchcraft, child sacrifice etc will always come to ruin. As sons and daughters suffer judgements as a result of the sins of their father, so a nation suffers judgements for the sins of their leader. So vote wisely! A bad leader can lead a nation into sin. Look at King Manasseh of Judah or Obama! When Mr Smalley can create a Sunset, a Star or a whale then he can start to make objections.
godlessHelp outlaw any and all indoctrination of children in any religion., within a couple of generations no one will be stupid enough to believe any of those ridiculous fairy tales.
Did Dr. Brown read the Old Testament? There were plenty of times that God was talking directly with people and they still complained and tried to bargain with him and stuff. This beauty that wipes away all doubt is a God in his own image.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
Listening to the whole debate, Michael asks David to directly challenge the historicity of any of the stories in the gospels, and it's just not David's field. But Robert Price or Richard Carrier could do that. Why don't I see any debates with them vs. Dr. Brown? That would be more interesting than hearing Michael trying to convert a skeptic like David with stories about human experiences that just can't be challenged due to lack of evidence. Still, love Dogma Debate. #128 and #129 are two of my favorite debates. It's really worth listening to #129 the problem of evil.
Hannibal Bateman I'm of the opinion that even the most basic counter-apologetics are not David's field. He clearly has no understanding of the Is-Ought problem for starters. (not to defend the other guy, who is speaking directly out of his ass)
xxxTHENIGHTMAN To be fair to David (both of them...) a lot of people *really* misunderstand the is-ought problem. I think David's real problem at the moment is he misunderstands freewill and that we really do not have it (he hasn't fully reconciled this, but in his defense - our culture surely hasn't either). We have degrees of freedom - or agency - but we are not autonomous agents as we classically imagine ourselves to be. What could that possibly mean about what we should mean by "should" and what could we be doing when we entertain the idea of choosing otherwise when we know we can only ever choose whatever it is we choose? This leads directly to the questions of where our desires "come from" and that's what most people will say you need if you wish to derive an "ought" from an "is". We all know that "is" is all there ever was or will be, but the ought becomes important because it is how we exercise our degrees of freedom to affect the course of the future (this is how we determine our future, but we ourselves are determined by the processes which underpin us which we cannot inspect or control...). So we do what we will do (you really just get string of tautologies when you try to break this down - the information is spread out across our brain in 3rd person and our awareness in 1st person in a way that resists conventional analysis or subdivision). All this is further confounded in the temporal sense because our conceptualizing about what we would like to be the case is the means by which we clarify our desires and engage with the world to bring our desires into reality (it is the 1st person representation we experience while manifesting our 3rd person behaviors - again, more tautologies). It would be more accurate to describe ourselves as another means by which the 2nd law of thermodynamics achieves its ends (apologies for the anthropomorphic description), life is just the sort of "order" required to facilitate the maximum aggregate rate of entropy generation within large systems. How deliciously ironic that the process that gave us life is the thing we would strive to overcome? The more ordered and advanced our technology becomes, the more capable we will become of extracting energy for computation - producing more "order" - an expanding fractal in time and space. It's all for want of an answer to Asimov's last question (and add Dark Energy to that while you're at it), and you see is a rather bleak but certainly interesting scenario filled with intense debates about how we should allocate our computational resources to solve this perhaps hopeless problem. Should we simply strive to experience as much enjoyment as possible for the moment (billions of years long) before the energy require for computation retreats from our reach, and our intelligence slowly declines from its apex as a result -OR- do we prioritize finding a solution to avoid heat-death when we reach the apex of our available energy reserves and net intelligence to perhaps create a new universe for new life as our light fades. Once one understands that the universe's expansion is accelerating and the 2nd law, this question surfaces immediately. In any case, it's remarkable that subjective experience is within the "possibility space" of the 2nd law as a sort of causal eddy current of sorts - it's amazing to consider that that's part of the repertoire of what matter and energy in our universe can do, and I actually feel a little sorry for theists TBH, though it's still quite understandable - even with all the pieces being there online, it still takes a fair bit of dedicated thought. This picture of ourselves totally blows away their genie guy in the sky making us out of dust, failure after failure - those darn humans and their knowing right from wrong and their free will wrecking the show LOL! When you add first person subjectivity to evolution and what we already come to discover about the cosmos that our ancestors could never have seen... it's really quite impoverished by comparison. Surely, this is what Krauss means when he says the universe has a much better imagination that we do. It's funny and sad that they themselves - as conscious self-aware individuals - totally blow away their own concept they revere as "God" on every level - if they could only see just a little bit more of the picture we can already piece together.... While this is all profoundly counter intuitive and awe inspiring, I think those of us who are lucky enough to have the time and the ability to piece this together do have some responsibility to share this understanding with our neighbors. Clearly David is doing his part, but have to find a way to help each other out. Now is this just my opinion or is there something a little stronger that we can say about these perceived duties? There are so many different tacks one could take, but knowing ourselves deeply is both profoundly useful and also commensurate with "knowing" the rest of the universe. I'm not about to go Deepak on you here, but in a sense, we can only know ourselves by knowing our universe - so in a very real sense, it is true to say that the only frontier that has ever existed, really is the self (on the broadest view). Another angle one can take here is that everything we can ever become aware of is a mental state. So this is another sense in which the self is all there is (well... consciousness or our subjective space is all we have... definitions - what fun sigh). A statement like this may seem rife with logical fallacies of composition and division etc (often, they are...), but as long as we keep it within our light-cone, we are casually entangled with everything else to some degree or another (often a very small degree, but it is whatever it is). There are a few more steps, but this picture is sufficient to reveal enlightened self-interest as prudent altruism at the limit. We may just be dancing to the the tune of the 2nd law, but that we should wish to enjoy this dance as deeply as we can for as long as possible is not at all an arbitrary happenstance - it's an indication, and our own perspective - of how evolutionary processes - such as ourselves - are constrained. We have to patient with ourselves and patient with others along the way - depending on where a person is at, it can take a *lot* of cognitive work on the part of the listener to absorb all of this. It's downright difficult to get this across in a simple way too, which no doubt evidence that I still don't understand it fully myself - it's still mysterious even though we really have most of the required pieces digitally available to us on demand by google and wikipedia now... In any case, the is-ought problem is actually a corollary of the so called "hard problem of consciousness". It surely is hard if anything is, and it's complicated as well, but we've made a lot of progress on this front and it's time we all updated our view of ourselves a bit. We can at least try to yank our culture out of the common sense dualism most of us still cling to at any rate.
Richard Wellwood David might benefit from reading different philosophical arguments on freewill. Then, he could come at these pathetic apologetic defenses from a different angle and maybe force them to think about what they believe and open their minds to other perspectives.
This debate made me so disturbed. How twisted this guys brain has become for basically justifying worshipping hitler. Granted it's my perspective and may not be the case... But it almost seems that this guy is so scared that he will use drugs again if this isn't true.... So it has to be true for him. The last two podcasts gave me hope for humanity. Then I heard this one and realized there is a lot more work that needs to be done.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
I just listened to this debate. The bottom line is that this guy will believe just about anything for just about any reason. I just hope someone on the fence could see it as clearly as I did.
+rrpostalagain You are wrong. He will use any excuse for HIS believe, he won't believe everything, or else he would have taken up the interviewers ideas and integrated it into his own weird model of how graceful and mercyful the slaughterer of millions must have been and how awesome he would be to instantly convert the skeptic to blindly believing too... It's so deep in their heads that god is great and good and moral that no argument even with direct textual evidence in their own book of truths and guidance can ever convince them their headcanon is wrong.
rrpostalagain I felt it needed to be whittled a little bit down as "absolutely everything" would also include the things he definitely did not believe as he did fight them vehemently with his own position. ;) But in a broader sense i will agree: As long as it fits his preconceived notions he will accept anything regardless how stupid it could sound or how imporbable it might be, just for the fact that it helps his already firm position. Everything contradictory will be refuted on the same base. Better?
Urs F This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
I don't really like if atheists use the Bible to make a point. Because, first, the Christian apologetic is really good and experienced in twisting the words so that they will mean whatever he wants, and the Christians will believe him, no matter how idiotic the twisting is, because he is the Good Guy standing up for Jesus. And second, because the Bible (from the point of view of atheism) is just a book full of tales. Like in Lord of the Rings, why didn't Frodo and Gandalf not just ride the eagles and dropped the ring into Mount Doom? Because then we wouldn't have a good story to read. Likewise, why did Satan turned away from God? Because the story in the Bible needed a Bad Guy, so that Christians can blame anything bad to that Bad Guy.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
So yeah David Smalley got his asshole widened in this debate. A lot of the comments here show that there are atheist sheep too. I respect when people are after the truth at all cost, even if it means finding out they are wrong. I'm not even a Christian, and disagreed with a lot of what Brown said, but he wiped the floor with Smalley debate wise. I've been listening to Dogma Debate for a long time and have realized that David has a hand full of "go to" arguments and traps that he is used to working well on his show. Dr. Brown, in my opinion, successfully sidestepped the traps and actually had coherent responses to David's arguments. That being said, you can still win a debate and be wrong. I think David also does better when he has his panel of experts to help him gang bang the Christians he brings on his show. I'd really like to see David have Dr. Brown back on the show with a Biblical scholar like Richard Carrier, and a much better debater like Matt Dillahunty. I think the results would be much different then. I would suspect they would whittle down all his arguments to the point where only his own subjective experience was left for him to cling to.
Ray Cyst I completely agree. The main thing I took away from the "debate" is that Smalley was completely outclassed when it comes to intelligence. Dr. Brown is clearly on a different level than Smalley. Dr. Brown was calm and collected and had a coherent response to every question asked. Smalley was a flustered wreck and his emotions got the best of him. I felt like Smalley was just a parrot repeating any atheist talking point he could possibly think of and when Brown would actually offer a response, Smalley would just move on to some other talking point. The whole talk felt like Smalley was just trying to play the gotchya game, but continuously failed at it. He also never offered any unique perspective on anything and really added nothing to the conversation. Also, Smalley repeatedly calls this a debate. Someone needs to tell Smalley the difference between a debate and a conversation. If this had been a real debate, Smalley would have had no chance in winning it. People like Carrier and Dilahunty are the real deal and can easily hold their own against people like Dr. Brown. Smalley on the other had, is like the little brother who has dreams of one day being as cool as his older brothers, but everyone around him knows that he will never be half as successful as his older, more superior in every way, brothers. I also completely agree with the opinion that there are plenty of atheist blind followers just like theists. They blindly cheer for their chosen team and refuse to recognize that their side could ever be wrong about anything or that the other side could ever be right about anything. I am honestly a little concerned reading through these comments. I would have expected more comments such as yours and a lot less "what a dumb atheist" type comments. If Smalley insists on calling this conversation a debate, which was really more like an inquisition carried out by an idiot, then so be it. Debate results = Dr. Brown + 1 Smalley 0
Ray Cyst "So yeah David Smalley got his asshole widened in this debate." I couldn't disagree more. All Brown says really boils down to "Puny humans can't stand in judgement of God, and everything that God does that you see as evil is really for the greater good, you just can't understand because you're a puny human." That's pure, unadulterated bullshit.
It always amazes me the hoops that believers have to jump through to justify their beliefs. The biggest problem I have is that they have to start with assertions that cannot be tested or frankly supported and without which their arguments collapse completely. David was being polite in saying he found "god's" behaviour abhorrent because "god" doesn't exist so the evil is within the god believer. If you can countenance the behaviour of the Old Testament deity the evil is not with the imaginary being but with the believer.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
D Seattle This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
this whole debate just shows all the gymnastics that theists have to go through to someone justify their crazy belief its actually funny to witness how hard he tries to make sense of the bible.
A magical being that's so powerful it can speak things into existence wouldn't have to harm anyone to make humans stop doing harmful things. All it'd have to do is remove all harmful things from the menu of things humans can choose to do. If a behavior isn't available, it can't be chosen. Simple! _"A God who arrogates to Himself the right to do evil, is a tyrant; a tyrant is not a model for men. He ought to be an execrable object in their eyes. Is it not strange that, in order to justify Divinity, they made of Him the most unjust of beings? As soon as we complain of His conduct, they think to silence us by claiming that God is the Master; which signifies that God, being the strongest, He is not subjected to ordinary rules. But the right of the strongest is the violation of all rights; it can pass as a right but in the eyes of a savage conqueror, who, in the intoxication of his fury, imagines he has the right to do as he pleases with the unfortunate ones whom he has conquered; this barbarous right can appear legitimate only to slaves, who are blind enough to think that everything is allowed to tyrants, who are too strong for them to resist."_ - Jean Meslier, "Superstition in all Ages"
YY4Me133 This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
Criminals hate justice.
Yahweh definitely doesn't want justice.
Wow. It is stunning how faith simply fucks up the way some people reason.
Sadly, this is an amazing demonstration of that.
A head-shaker.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
It's been a long time since I listened to Dave and he has grown exponentially. I'm going to start listening to his show again
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
Ah, the old "If you don't believe my thing you can't believe any of the things I choose to link to it."
Perfect example of how one's humanity got sacrificed on the altar of religion.
On the psychology of the matter I have but one thing to say: _Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development_
They speak of ultimate or absolute morality but fail to realize that their moral insight is *quite literally* comparable to that of an infant. They are stuck in level1/stage1 of moral development: Obedience and punishment orientation. Most children grow out of that phase by the time they are 5 or 6 years old and moves to level1/stage2.
They suffer from the moral equivalent of a child with stunted growth due to severe malnourishment.
If we go right back to the start--human suffering began when we got kicked out of the Garden. So then was being kicked out of the Garden a good thing or a bad thing. Scripture intonates that it was a good thing because it would not have been good if we would have lived forever in our sinful state of being. So then, God's reaction (which resulted in human suffering) to our fallen state of being, was necessary in order to avoid an even worse consequence than our present suffering.
God is perfectly holy and He calls all people to be holy. He is not only jealous but perfectly jealous. Nations that practice idol worship, divination, witchcraft, child sacrifice etc will always come to ruin. As sons and daughters suffer judgements as a result of the sins of their father, so a nation suffers judgements for the sins of their leader. So vote wisely! A bad leader can lead a nation into sin. Look at King Manasseh of Judah or Obama! When Mr Smalley can create a Sunset, a Star or a whale then he can start to make objections.
How the fuck are we ever going to win with these people ...
Terence Francis and proper education.
godlessHelp outlaw any and all indoctrination of children in any religion., within a couple of generations no one will be stupid enough to believe any of those ridiculous fairy tales.
Did Dr. Brown read the Old Testament? There were plenty of times that God was talking directly with people and they still complained and tried to bargain with him and stuff. This beauty that wipes away all doubt is a God in his own image.
3:31 we'll see how that turns out LOL
I love MB lol
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
When your presups contridict your own worldview....
Michael brown you poor poor man.
Listening to the whole debate, Michael asks David to directly challenge the historicity of any of the stories in the gospels, and it's just not David's field. But Robert Price or Richard Carrier could do that. Why don't I see any debates with them vs. Dr. Brown? That would be more interesting than hearing Michael trying to convert a skeptic like David with stories about human experiences that just can't be challenged due to lack of evidence. Still, love Dogma Debate. #128 and #129 are two of my favorite debates. It's really worth listening to #129 the problem of evil.
Hannibal Bateman I'm of the opinion that even the most basic counter-apologetics are not David's field. He clearly has no understanding of the Is-Ought problem for starters. (not to defend the other guy, who is speaking directly out of his ass)
xxxTHENIGHTMAN To be fair to David (both of them...) a lot of people *really* misunderstand the is-ought problem. I think David's real problem at the moment is he misunderstands freewill and that we really do not have it (he hasn't fully reconciled this, but in his defense - our culture surely hasn't either). We have degrees of freedom - or agency - but we are not autonomous agents as we classically imagine ourselves to be. What could that possibly mean about what we should mean by "should" and what could we be doing when we entertain the idea of choosing otherwise when we know we can only ever choose whatever it is we choose?
This leads directly to the questions of where our desires "come from" and that's what most people will say you need if you wish to derive an "ought" from an "is". We all know that "is" is all there ever was or will be, but the ought becomes important because it is how we exercise our degrees of freedom to affect the course of the future (this is how we determine our future, but we ourselves are determined by the processes which underpin us which we cannot inspect or control...). So we do what we will do (you really just get string of tautologies when you try to break this down - the information is spread out across our brain in 3rd person and our awareness in 1st person in a way that resists conventional analysis or subdivision). All this is further confounded in the temporal sense because our conceptualizing about what we would like to be the case is the means by which we clarify our desires and engage with the world to bring our desires into reality (it is the 1st person representation we experience while manifesting our 3rd person behaviors - again, more tautologies).
It would be more accurate to describe ourselves as another means by which the 2nd law of thermodynamics achieves its ends (apologies for the anthropomorphic description), life is just the sort of "order" required to facilitate the maximum aggregate rate of entropy generation within large systems. How deliciously ironic that the process that gave us life is the thing we would strive to overcome? The more ordered and advanced our technology becomes, the more capable we will become of extracting energy for computation - producing more "order" - an expanding fractal in time and space. It's all for want of an answer to Asimov's last question (and add Dark Energy to that while you're at it), and you see is a rather bleak but certainly interesting scenario filled with intense debates about how we should allocate our computational resources to solve this perhaps hopeless problem. Should we simply strive to experience as much enjoyment as possible for the moment (billions of years long) before the energy require for computation retreats from our reach, and our intelligence slowly declines from its apex as a result -OR- do we prioritize finding a solution to avoid heat-death when we reach the apex of our available energy reserves and net intelligence to perhaps create a new universe for new life as our light fades. Once one understands that the universe's expansion is accelerating and the 2nd law, this question surfaces immediately.
In any case, it's remarkable that subjective experience is within the "possibility space" of the 2nd law as a sort of causal eddy current of sorts - it's amazing to consider that that's part of the repertoire of what matter and energy in our universe can do, and I actually feel a little sorry for theists TBH, though it's still quite understandable - even with all the pieces being there online, it still takes a fair bit of dedicated thought. This picture of ourselves totally blows away their genie guy in the sky making us out of dust, failure after failure - those darn humans and their knowing right from wrong and their free will wrecking the show LOL! When you add first person subjectivity to evolution and what we already come to discover about the cosmos that our ancestors could never have seen... it's really quite impoverished by comparison. Surely, this is what Krauss means when he says the universe has a much better imagination that we do. It's funny and sad that they themselves - as conscious self-aware individuals - totally blow away their own concept they revere as "God" on every level - if they could only see just a little bit more of the picture we can already piece together....
While this is all profoundly counter intuitive and awe inspiring, I think those of us who are lucky enough to have the time and the ability to piece this together do have some responsibility to share this understanding with our neighbors. Clearly David is doing his part, but have to find a way to help each other out. Now is this just my opinion or is there something a little stronger that we can say about these perceived duties? There are so many different tacks one could take, but knowing ourselves deeply is both profoundly useful and also commensurate with "knowing" the rest of the universe. I'm not about to go Deepak on you here, but in a sense, we can only know ourselves by knowing our universe - so in a very real sense, it is true to say that the only frontier that has ever existed, really is the self (on the broadest view). Another angle one can take here is that everything we can ever become aware of is a mental state. So this is another sense in which the self is all there is (well... consciousness or our subjective space is all we have... definitions - what fun sigh).
A statement like this may seem rife with logical fallacies of composition and division etc (often, they are...), but as long as we keep it within our light-cone, we are casually entangled with everything else to some degree or another (often a very small degree, but it is whatever it is). There are a few more steps, but this picture is sufficient to reveal enlightened self-interest as prudent altruism at the limit. We may just be dancing to the the tune of the 2nd law, but that we should wish to enjoy this dance as deeply as we can for as long as possible is not at all an arbitrary happenstance - it's an indication, and our own perspective - of how evolutionary processes - such as ourselves - are constrained. We have to patient with ourselves and patient with others along the way - depending on where a person is at, it can take a *lot* of cognitive work on the part of the listener to absorb all of this. It's downright difficult to get this across in a simple way too, which no doubt evidence that I still don't understand it fully myself - it's still mysterious even though we really have most of the required pieces digitally available to us on demand by google and wikipedia now...
In any case, the is-ought problem is actually a corollary of the so called "hard problem of consciousness". It surely is hard if anything is, and it's complicated as well, but we've made a lot of progress on this front and it's time we all updated our view of ourselves a bit. We can at least try to yank our culture out of the common sense dualism most of us still cling to at any rate.
Richard Wellwood David might benefit from reading different philosophical arguments on freewill. Then, he could come at these pathetic apologetic defenses from a different angle and maybe force them to think about what they believe and open their minds to other perspectives.
Lmao I gotta pray for you people
He needs to realize that we agree with him only one thing completely; that he certainly is the one that has the puny little brain.
There is literally nothing wrong with Dr Browns refutation. All you atheists can do is complain.
This debate made me so disturbed. How twisted this guys brain has become for basically justifying worshipping hitler. Granted it's my perspective and may not be the case... But it almost seems that this guy is so scared that he will use drugs again if this isn't true.... So it has to be true for him. The last two podcasts gave me hope for humanity. Then I heard this one and realized there is a lot more work that needs to be done.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
I can't listen to that religious fanatic making up excuses at a pace where he contradicts himself and doesn't even notice it!
ok
Sorry!
Saw the link
I just listened to this debate. The bottom line is that this guy will believe just about anything for just about any reason. I just hope someone on the fence could see it as clearly as I did.
+rrpostalagain You are wrong. He will use any excuse for HIS believe, he won't believe everything, or else he would have taken up the interviewers ideas and integrated it into his own weird model of how graceful and mercyful the slaughterer of millions must have been and how awesome he would be to instantly convert the skeptic to blindly believing too... It's so deep in their heads that god is great and good and moral that no argument even with direct textual evidence in their own book of truths and guidance can ever convince them their headcanon is wrong.
+Urs F (Feno3000) I don't think I am any more wring than you are, since I meant approximately the the same thing.
rrpostalagain
I felt it needed to be whittled a little bit down as "absolutely everything" would also include the things he definitely did not believe as he did fight them vehemently with his own position. ;) But in a broader sense i will agree: As long as it fits his preconceived notions he will accept anything regardless how stupid it could sound or how imporbable it might be, just for the fact that it helps his already firm position. Everything contradictory will be refuted on the same base.
Better?
+Urs F (Feno3000) works for me
Urs F This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
I don't really like if atheists use the Bible to make a point. Because, first, the Christian apologetic is really good and experienced in twisting the words so that they will mean whatever he wants, and the Christians will believe him, no matter how idiotic the twisting is, because he is the Good Guy standing up for Jesus. And second, because the Bible (from the point of view of atheism) is just a book full of tales. Like in Lord of the Rings, why didn't Frodo and Gandalf not just ride the eagles and dropped the ring into Mount Doom? Because then we wouldn't have a good story to read. Likewise, why did Satan turned away from God? Because the story in the Bible needed a Bad Guy, so that Christians can blame anything bad to that Bad Guy.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
This debate was embarrassing for Smalley. Brown mopped the floor with him
So yeah David Smalley got his asshole widened in this debate. A lot of the comments here show that there are atheist sheep too. I respect when people are after the truth at all cost, even if it means finding out they are wrong. I'm not even a Christian, and disagreed with a lot of what Brown said, but he wiped the floor with Smalley debate wise. I've been listening to Dogma Debate for a long time and have realized that David has a hand full of "go to" arguments and traps that he is used to working well on his show. Dr. Brown, in my opinion, successfully sidestepped the traps and actually had coherent responses to David's arguments. That being said, you can still win a debate and be wrong. I think David also does better when he has his panel of experts to help him gang bang the Christians he brings on his show. I'd really like to see David have Dr. Brown back on the show with a Biblical scholar like Richard Carrier, and a much better debater like Matt Dillahunty. I think the results would be much different then. I would suspect they would whittle down all his arguments to the point where only his own subjective experience was left for him to cling to.
Ray Cyst I completely agree. The main thing I took away from the "debate" is that Smalley was completely outclassed when it comes to intelligence. Dr. Brown is clearly on a different level than Smalley. Dr. Brown was calm and collected and had a coherent response to every question asked. Smalley was a flustered wreck and his emotions got the best of him. I felt like Smalley was just a parrot repeating any atheist talking point he could possibly think of and when Brown would actually offer a response, Smalley would just move on to some other talking point. The whole talk felt like Smalley was just trying to play the gotchya game, but continuously failed at it. He also never offered any unique perspective on anything and really added nothing to the conversation. Also, Smalley repeatedly calls this a debate. Someone needs to tell Smalley the difference between a debate and a conversation. If this had been a real debate, Smalley would have had no chance in winning it. People like Carrier and Dilahunty are the real deal and can easily hold their own against people like Dr. Brown. Smalley on the other had, is like the little brother who has dreams of one day being as cool as his older brothers, but everyone around him knows that he will never be half as successful as his older, more superior in every way, brothers.
I also completely agree with the opinion that there are plenty of atheist blind followers just like theists. They blindly cheer for their chosen team and refuse to recognize that their side could ever be wrong about anything or that the other side could ever be right about anything. I am honestly a little concerned reading through these comments. I would have expected more comments such as yours and a lot less "what a dumb atheist" type comments.
If Smalley insists on calling this conversation a debate, which was really more like an inquisition carried out by an idiot, then so be it. Debate results = Dr. Brown + 1 Smalley 0
Can't agree... Ordering a death of an infant isn't excusable. Granted the dr brown had some good points but a new born baby is not wicked.
Ray Cyst "So yeah David Smalley got his asshole widened in this debate."
I couldn't disagree more. All Brown says really boils down to "Puny humans can't stand in judgement of God, and everything that God does that you see as evil is really for the greater good, you just can't understand because you're a puny human."
That's pure, unadulterated bullshit.
david smalley sounds like an offended child. seriously. my youth group kids ask the same questions.
Do you resort to ad homs with them to as a means to avoid addressing their points?
It always amazes me the hoops that believers have to jump through to justify their beliefs. The biggest problem I have is that they have to start with assertions that cannot be tested or frankly supported and without which their arguments collapse completely. David was being polite in saying he found "god's" behaviour abhorrent because "god" doesn't exist so the evil is within the god believer. If you can countenance the behaviour of the Old Testament deity the evil is not with the imaginary being but with the believer.
This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
"Beauty coming out of pain and suffering"...are you kidding me? That is sick. I wish I could just explain shit away like that.
D Seattle This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
this whole debate just shows all the gymnastics that theists have to go through to someone justify their crazy belief its actually funny to witness how hard he tries to make sense of the bible.
A magical being that's so powerful it can speak things into existence wouldn't have to harm anyone to make humans stop doing harmful things. All it'd have to do is remove all harmful things from the menu of things humans can choose to do. If a behavior isn't available, it can't be chosen. Simple!
_"A God who arrogates to Himself the right to do evil, is a tyrant; a tyrant is not a model for men. He ought to be an execrable object in their eyes. Is it not strange that, in order to justify Divinity, they made of Him the most unjust of beings? As soon as we complain of His conduct, they think to silence us by claiming that God is the Master; which signifies that God, being the strongest, He is not subjected to ordinary rules. But the right of the strongest is the violation of all rights; it can pass as a right but in the eyes of a savage conqueror, who, in the intoxication of his fury, imagines he has the right to do as he pleases with the unfortunate ones whom he has conquered; this barbarous right can appear legitimate only to slaves, who are blind enough to think that everything is allowed to tyrants, who are too strong for them to resist."_ - Jean Meslier, "Superstition in all Ages"
YY4Me133 This is deceptive and taken out of context to make Smalley look good. Listen to the WHOLE debate and Dr Brown is the very clear winner! It seems they have taken it off their website. I wonder if it is because David really fumbles in it.
Poor god he is so misunderstood yeah right.
non sense! Dr. MB is joke!!!
Sooo... It is okay for people be killed, by other people, as long as it is for or by a invisible, magical entity? #Insane
Religion requires You to love someone you fear!
This is the basis of sato-masochism
God Bless U Michael! Atheism Is Soooo Irrational When Taking To Its Conclusion.