Brian Flemming sums up

centuri0n,

Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you. I appreciate the structural fairness and liberty you provided here as host, even though I know you consider some of my ideas blasphemous. You keep pointing out to me that the environment at DebateBlog is better than that of conservative talk radio, and I strongly agree -- it is. The game isn't rigged here.

However, the experience has still been somewhat frustrating, and via email you have been expressing befuddlement as to why I would be frustrated, asking if I thought the structure or rules were unfair. A thousand times, no. It's not about the structure -- it's about you.

In this debate, you have shown a tendency to hear what you want to hear, instead of hearing what I really said. For example, in my last question, I did not ask if the suffering in Hell would cause you to be happy in Heaven. Obviously, I was asking if you could be happy in spite of the suffering of others in Hell. Still, you wrote, "I don't think that the joy of Heaven will be based on your personal suffering." Well, I didn't suggest it would be. But you heard what you preferred to hear.

You have plausible deniability. In a court of law, I couldn't prove that this wasn't a sincere misinterpretation. If the debate is merely a game of words, you technically stayed within the rules. Still, it's frustrating that you chose to answer an easier question than the one I asked.

I didn't do this to you.

For example, when you asked me what was worthwhile in Christianity, I heard that question for what it was. I praised those aspects of Christian doctrine that I truly feel are good. I didn't hear a different question just because honestly answering the real one required me to praise the Bible. I even volunteered that my own ethical system is based partly on concepts I learned in a Christian environment. I knew that you wanted to know what I found valuable in Christian doctrine, and I told you. I could have played games, but I gave you good faith instead.

I strongly suspect that your irrational commitment to a religious ideology causes you not to return the favor of good faith. The stakes are too high for you to concede a thing, even when conceding would be the honest action. This mandatory prioritization of defending the faith above all else is what makes religious ideologies -- Christian or otherwise -- poisonous to good moral behavior.

But I'm not leaving the DebateBlog bitter about the experience. I won the debate. I made claims and supported them. I heard your arguments for what they were and answered them as best I could. When you asked for evidence I could not provide, I clearly admitted that I could not provide it and explained why I thought my conclusions did not require that evidence. In contrast, you avoided addressing my strongest points entirely and ultimately made some outlandish supernatural claims without any support at all. To the non-indoctrinated, that's how the record of this debate will appear, and I'm satisfied with that.

I want to sum up by making a statement about atheism, because from reading your writing here and elsewhere, I feel that when you address the concept of atheism, you construct your own version of it, and then criticize the straw man you made. You act as if "atheism" is an actual philosophy of life, and then you criticize it for essentially being a philosophy of "nothing."

In one way, you're right. By itself, atheism is nothing.

Atheism is merely the absence of a certain brand of lunacy. That's it. Nothing more. It is not in and of itself a philosophy.

I doubt that I know even one atheist who, when asked to name his or her philosophy of life, would reply "atheism." Because atheism is about you, not us. You define others by whether they believe in a sky god. To you, I'm an a-theist because I'm not a theist like you.

But I don't define myself by the magazines I don't subscribe to.

You'll never truly understand those of us who have rejected sky-god belief unless you can be open to considering how we define ourselves rather than how you define us -- and to acknowledge that there is a wide variety of philosophies that happen not to include Bronze Age myths at their center.

You're right to say that atheism is a road to nowhere. It's a cul-de-sac, really. But the actual philosophies of various atheists go on for miles, and the roads sprawl in all sorts of directions -- directions so varied that the term "atheism" becomes almost irrelevant as a common identifier. Metaphysical naturalism and secular humanism would be two rich places to begin a study of actual philosophies subscribed to by some nonbelievers. In a slightly different direction are atheists like Sam Harris, who achieves moral insights through meditation -- although without subscribing to a single supernatural idea in Buddhism. Atheist Robert M. Price has rejected the unsupportable claims of the Bible but is still a churchgoing Christian whose philosophy of life is informed by the allegorical tales in scripture.

I hope that once you grasp that the "atheism" you rail against is really a straw man, you may be on your way to understanding how those of us who have no King to submit to, and no Hell to fear, can have lives as complete, satisfying and moral as anyone else's.