Debate Quotes

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

~ Christopher Hitchens

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.

~ Stefan Molyneux

There's more to logic than identifying logical fallacies.

~ Criss Jami

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

~ Christopher Hitchens

In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.

~ William Penn

It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.

~ Criss Jami

The clash of ideas is not weakness.Truth reaches its place when tussling with error.

~ Richard Henry Pratt

Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.

~ Carl R White

Maisie bit her lip. She had learned that sometimes it was best to let words die of their own accord, rather than fight them.

~ Jacqueline Winspear

If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.

~ Amit Kalantri

We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

~ Thomas Hardy

In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby.

~ Parul Wadhwa

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

~ C.s. Lewis

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

~ Carl Sagan

It is always healthy to be honest.

~ Amit Kalantri

The only sort of pride that may serve a man well on that rarest occasion is his hatred of being wrong. It keeps his mouth shut, his ears open, and his research extensive. And yet this is also the deadliest because when he is in fact proven wrong, he absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. It then keeps his mouth open, his ears shut, and his research inexistent.

~ Criss Jami

Some of the most polished ideas are discovered through healthy, honest debate, so if you don't argue with yourself every once in a while, other people will gladly point out if, in any sense, you missed a spot.

~ Criss Jami

Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree? Rabbi Stern

~ Athol Dickson

If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ?

~ Alex Morritt

We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Speak with caution. Even if someone forgives harsh words you've spoken, they may be too hurt to ever forget them. Don't leave a legacy of pain and regret of things you never should have said.

~ Germany Kent

Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.

~ Criss Jami

In my view, ideas and other intellectual productions are more interesting, more indicative of intelligence, and more productively debated than IQ alone.

~ Christopher Langan

Good gods are scarce because the majority of gods are created by evil men

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Why do religious believers hate unbelievers? The feel threatened by them, they feel besieged by them. Religions consider themselves as separate tribes in their own rights and feel like unbelievers will one day overrun their strongholds

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Every word that comes after And the Lord told me. . . “is a pious lie

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Some people are so stiff and inhumane as the dogma's they believe in

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Give me something to worship whatever.” Cries the human soul

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Spiritual leaders, priests and prophets are lamps burning in the dark, seeking meaning for humanity.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Science cannot disprove god. Science studies the things that are. The eternal question is who or what made them to be

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Why doesn't the pope convert to Calvinism? Why doesn't the Dalai Lama, convert to Christianity, why doesn't Billy Graham convert to Islam, Why doesn't the Ayatollahs convert to Buddhism, Why isn't Buddhism swept away? Religious leaders know that all religions are equal; they know that no one of them has the monopoly to the knowledge of God. They know that each religion is trying to find the hidden God and that no one religion can claim to have found him beyond doubt. That's why they remain where they are and respect each other.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Can really anybody put his hand on his heart and profess to know beyond doubt what happens on the other side of this life?

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Once you believe that god is not a private property of anybody, you are on your way to becoming a new messiah. Maybe your own if not the world's

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Theology is like assuming that there is a black cat in a dark room where in fact there is no black cat, and endeavoring to study the cat's properties and how it may have evolved from its ancestors.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

The eyes of god are upon you, I mean the eyes of society. We are prisoners of societies in which we live

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

You take away my golden dreams and my visions of paradise, in its place you wake me up and hand me your reasons and facts and crude reality. You have ruined my life. If I commit murder or hang myself, let the god I used to pray to repay you in full.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

If you believe that God is good and that He loves you without regard to whom you are or what you do, you will worship Him wholeheartedly. You will praise him with thanksgiving. If you believe He is angry against you, you will come to him with fear and trying to appease his anger. And you don't know when His anger will be over. Such a god keeps you in a perpetual psychological anguish. That is the typical kind of god we usually worship. That is the typical god approved by authority.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

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