11 September 2008 15:00
I found the speakers for the affirmative interesting funny and had excellent points, the negative hauled out the fine tuning, the religion of environmentalism, Nazism, quotes from scripture and finally Atheism = Communism.
Listen it’s worth it.
The audio file can be found here
From the I.Q Squared series of public debates I give you a debate courtesy of ABC’s fora service:
Topic: “We would be better off without religion”.
Affirmative:
- legal publisher and columnist Richard Ackland,
- former Democrats senator Lyn Allison
- U.S. professor of philosophy, physics and astronomy Vic Stenger.
Negative:
- Professor Ian Plimer, with
- Professor Suzanne Rutland from Sydney Uni’s Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies
- Oxford scientist and mathematician Dr John Lennox,
Chair
St James Ethics Centre Executive Director Simon Longstaff.
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The first speaker was definitely the best – the other ‘pro’ speakers meandered a bit much into `disproving God’ territory – which wasn’t really the topic at hand. Not much challenging of weak or nonsensical ideas either, such as the anthropomorphic principle (i think) trotted out by the first anti speaker.
That was Lyn Allison who tried to campaign agianst Mercy Ministries in the Senate.
The other thing I found interesting was that it wasn’t a traditional debate in the sense that I understand it.
It was more like the speakers were putting their own views across without countering each others points.