Sunday, November 29, 2009

Live Intelligence Squared Debate

There is a live debate going on right now that will most likely be very interesting. You can view it at the following link.
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/live

"Atheism is the new fundamentalism"
In partnership with livestation.com, from 6.45pm (GMT) this evening, you will be able to watch online as Richard Dawkins, author of ‘The God Delusion’ and Professor A C Grayling, take on Richard Harries, the former bishop of Oxford, and Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, at this sold-out Wellington Squared event held at Wellington College, Berkshire. It will be chaired by the Headmaster of Wellington (and political historian) Anthony Seldon.

You can view the live comments from people watching the stream through twitter. The first speaker is from the Catholic Church which spawned the usual trite comments. Ill post my thoughts on the debate as it goes.

*facepalm* Hardly 20 minutes in and one of the atheist speakers, A C Grayling, has already brought up farries and pixies...

So far the two first speakers did not seem to address the topic of the debate.

Current speaker,  Moore, just got applause for a quip at Dawkins. Was not expecting that.

Moore is spending way too much time on Dawkins...
It is not like there is a lack of fundamentalist type thinking in other famous atheists.

Moore leaves the stage with both applause and boos.

Dawkins claims there is no equivalent of the Bible in atheism. While he may be technically correct, he underestimates the number of atheists who treat his book, The God Delusion, as holy scripture.

Dawkins just described religious people as inherently believing in "God of the gaps". Time for another facepalm.
And now he has pulled 911 into the debate as describing religious belief.

Well I tried to reopen the stream to see if it would reduce my CPU load as it was getting kind of high the page wont load again. It seems their server wont allow anyone to reconnect. Overall I thought the debate was fairly pointless. No one really addressed the actual topic. It largely gave me the impression of being a very verbose and erudite name calling contest.

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