The story is told of an item that appeared in the “events around town” column of a small-town paper: “The Middletown symphony orchestra played Beethoven last evening. Beethoven lost.” That quip came to mind the other day as I read of a recent debate at New York University one of an ongoing series on various controversial topics. The debate focused on the question “Would the world be better off without religion?” On one side were a couple professed atheists; on the other were a Christian polemicist and well-known Conservative clergyman David Wolpe sticking up for G-d as it were.
The audiences at these debates who tend toward the very liberal are polled about their opinions on the topic before the debate and then again afterward. They previously voted lopsidedly against repealing Obamacare and scuttling diplomacy with Iran and in favor of declaring George W. Bush the worst president of the last 50 years. Yet another vote they took was in favor of the US stepping back from its special relationship with Israel — agreeing with the position of Rashid Khalidi the Columbia academic at whose dinner table Barack Obama had many conversations that were “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases …”
So it wasn’t surprising that a majority of the audience’s members wasn’t swayed from the anti-religious opinions they brought into the debate. But it certainly didn’t help that the advocate for religion was a denier of the truth of Torah.
The New York Times reported that each side argued against type. “The believers brandished statistics — religious people live longer …; give away more money (including to secular causes); and have started far fewer of history’s wars than is generally believed (only 7 percent by one count).… Meanwhile the doubters cited [Biblical] chapter and verse the more appalling the better.”
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