Battle of the Great Minds: Sam Harris versus Dennis Pranger

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See WITH YOUR OWN EYES! A FOUR ROUND DEBATE ON THE SUBJECT OF

WHY ARE ATHEISTS SO ANGRY

battling for the forces of RATIONALITY AND SCIENCE...

...SAMUEL HARRIS

battling for the forces of JUDEO-CHRISTANITY and CLASSICAL LIBERALISM...

...DENNIS PRAGER

WHO WON?

It's subjective. (link)

Dennis Prager will win hands down on any debate. I met Dennis Prager as a teenager and he made a big impression on me. I also had the opportunity to take his class on the first five books of the Bible(the Torah) at a local Hebrew University. His intellect is gigantic and he would win any debate.

Yeah, Dennis Prager is is the s---. My parents listen to him all the time on AM radio. Unlike Medvid or Ingrahm he sticks to very logical and dialectic ways of handling things - extremely logical guy. Tammy Bruce is really good too, if you ever have a chance to see her do a lecture check it out I recommend it.

Sammy did what he does best. Kick the theists in the nuts.

I honestly thought Sammy won.

My only issue in reading this - I really think Prager could have done more. When he talks politics, interpersonal dynamics, and things like that he makes a world of sense. The downside with this is he kept it minimal. They say he's debated this guy at least a few other times and maybe he was tired of repeating himself? I tend to agree with both Sam Harris and Dennis Prager on certain points. For one, I agree that when war is caused by religion its showing the biggest problems with faith and what human animalistic tendencies can do with it when in unsophisticated hands. On the other hand I live in America, I really don't see the stats of 90% of people believing in God or 53% thinking the world is only 6,000 years old - I've known far more agnostics or Christians who are open-minded to the idea that evolution and the story of creation in Genesis could be very well different angles of the same history.

On the other hand with Prager I agree that absence of proof isn't proof of absence but at the same time, going back to Samuel Harris's logic in my own mind and what I agree with, religion is like LSD or mushrooms - some people can handle it really well and grow on it in leaps and bounds while others go crazy, do really stupid things, or just become more degenerate versions of who they already were. Sophistication, while a very useful tool in understanding moderation, analyzing the world, and having a clue what's up is very important its cerebral thinking. Cerebral thinking isn't and really never has been in vogue in the general populace - if anything when you mind works on that page you find most of the people you get to know, if they get to see it in you and you can't dumb it down, run the opposite direction or get hostile on you. Yeah, Prager is more the first group and he can't take claim of responsibility for people doing stupid things in the name of God, like anyone else on his earth there's only one person he can manually control and thats him. Whether there's any evidence of god in looking at 3.1 billion characters of human DNA, I don't know and IMO if we really did evolve from some sort of oceanic microbe according to scientists they need to do what tracing they can to see just what the earliest form of life was and then figure our how similar its DNA was in complexity - that would tell us a lot more than trying to take blind guesses at what we don't know. Being that we don't know I still have to defend Prager's right to say that certainty on anything in terms of a supreme being - existence or nonexistence, is pretty arrogant and emotionally led.

I think the debate was apples vs. oranges - people who like apples will come out for apples, people who like oranges will come out for oranges. Neither of them really did anything better or more in depth than just spout a few paragraphs off the cuff, barely a serious or formal debate (which is about the only thing I think would do these two justice). I'd think neither of them really went anywhere aside from just summarizing some of their core beliefs on those specific angles. No winner on either side IMO.

"I ... am happy we took the time to correspond. But I never entered this debate with any hope that I would change your mind on this subject. The motto of my radio show is, 'I prefer clarity to agreement'." -Dennis Prager

While I believe in God, it is clear that Dennis Prager is only concerned with looking good in front of his audience, not winning arguments. For him, it's easy social status in appealing to God and the religious majority.

To change a scientist's mind, you have to mentalize with him, not belittle him.

For an example of how religion can be argued to be consistent with science, see my essay at http://www.geocities.com/zinites_page/mes.html (Matter, Energy, and Spirit).