Attention Atheists, none of you have even attempted to answer the issue of "atheists" destroying religions like christianity for the specific purpose of replacing it with another "new/old" religion.

Allegedly Scientific, Dawkins style atheism serves no purpose in protecting anybody other than criminals from their concsience.

i will repeat it for you, i am not a fundamentalist christian. Australia & it's constitution were created by christian founding fathers, it is the basis of ALL our laws, the true antisocial purpose of atheism is to destroy our nation/morals/society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JihQw39hyG0 BIBLICAL constitutional law

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7HJI5Jwzt0&feature=related Nietzsche amoral.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3LyLUEX83o&feature=related REAL australian BIBLICAL law, watch it all, but especially this one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferianism twisting truth to decieve

if you want NO rights, morals, or protection of law, then be an atheist/communazi with no conscience or morals.

if you WANT children to be neglected & abused, continue to destroy christianity

The problem with formal debates is that they are a poor format for constructive discussion because they allow both parties to waste valuable time rambling, regardless of whether or not what they’re rambling about is even relevant to the points of their fellow debaters.

Not only can this help to give the false impression that the person in the wrong may have a point, but it’s a waste of valuable time when each debater would otherwise be able to cut their opponent short and correct them when they already know where they’re going and thus robbing them of the opportunity to use the rhetoric and sophistry that is so often employed by the Craig and his ilk (that do nothing more than blur a otherwise simple issue) and preventing them from hammering out a bunch of misrepresentations that require their opponents to then waste valuable allocated time to correct.

Now, I’m not sure if this plays any part in Dawkins’ decision to avoid a snake like Craig but it certainly would for me.

Here’s a good example of just how much Craig fumbles and falters, with nowhere to turn, in a casual discussion when he no longer has the security and protection of a rigid formal debate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7g3lsFZ47Y

An absolute creaming there by Shelly Kagan.

Beautiful stuff!

Out of interest, Martin Ibn Warriq...

>>Madeleine in your capacity for independent thought if you represent even a minority of young people I have newfound faith in humanity.<<

I didn't notice any evidence of "independent thought" in the article. In fact, it was little more than a re-hash of content from the wealth of internet sites dedicated to "get Dawkins". Sixteen year-olds tend to get most of their copy online.

Much of Ms. Kirk's "independent thinking" seems to have originated here...

http://www.afaithtoliveby.com/tag/richard-dawkins/

or here...

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/theres-probably-no-dawkins-now-stop-worrying-and-enjoy-oct-25th-at-the-sheldonian-theatre/

or here...

http://www.svchapel.org/resources/articles/22-contemporary-issues/587-the-new-atheism

...but frankly, they all seem to say much the same thing.

But please, if you do spot any evidence of independent thought, or originality, or in fact anything more than a few snide remarks, don't hesitate to draw them to my attention. I am always prepared to question my position, and learn something new in the process.

I'd be particularly interested to hear whether Ms Kirk has actually visited any atheist web sites. I know they are few and far between, since there is no belief system to promote, but I'm sure she could have found some if she had tried,

Madeleine
Anamele
GrahamY
.. et al

The 3 Laws of Thought are "fundamental axiomatic rules upon which rational discourse itself is based. The rules have a long tradition in the history of philosophy" and worth considering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thought

Another ethical principle is the Burden of Proof - "He who avers, must prove".

WL Craig fails to do this
.

I do apologise Aristocrat, I’m indecently busy; I’ll get back to you, but for now I want to weigh in to the Craig debate.
It seems to me that where Shelly Kagan gets it wrong is when he hit’s those holier than though notes about accountability and saving a human life and the inspirational stuff about minimalist meaning, while simultaneously he is oblivious to the fact (apart perhaps from a show of hand-wringing) that his rationalism, his positivism, his progressivism (based on nihilism), his “funding”, is born of a rapacious system whereby the progressive element of humanity feeds off the rest, and all other fauna and flora—to no purpose or end they readily admit—we’re all just a flash in the pan. These rationalists rationalise as though they really were outside the ordinary moral (and material!) constraints that bother the theologian (whose position is also flawed, parasitic and self-interested of course). What is the rationalist’s ethical defence of the billions spent on space programmes and colliders and all the other exotic and fantastically expensive projects? while half of humanity starves and is denied the opportunity to indulge their passion for spoiled mature men’s toys? Rationalism is the ultimate in rationalisation; it allows their priests to indifferently (sorry “objectively”) develop nuclear weapons and gas chambers and whatever else is in demand. Not because they’re particularly fascinated by these innovations, but because that’s where the funding goes and that’s where they go—the ultimate in dumb conservatives! If Kagan is earnest in his insistence that he doesn’t need cosmological significance to infer meaning, why isn’t he more accountable about the speck of dust he helps to exploit? I felt sorry for Craig; we all have those moments when the eloquence goes on strike and we look like twits. But in his defence, Kagan had the advantage, the “common sense” is on his side, whereas it used to be on the other. The new common sense has no need of ethics, however much it pays lip service; it has cock-sure “confidence”!

@Pericles: Madeleine chose to invest her time thinking about a question of historically universal human significance - the question of God - a question that our 'culture' anxiously avoids posing. That judgment she exercised against conformism to the great tide of pop culture banality and hedonism particularly targeted at young people and financed by very powerful media conglomerates. That alone should merit encouragement especially from adult commenters.

Her argument was cogent and we should recognise that.

If you define independence as narrowly as you do then you have never had an independent thought and Eistein drawing from the pre-Socratics didn't either, or when Whitehead remarked “all Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato” Aquinas, Aristotle or Kant were not independent thinkers.

It is a mark of intellectual virtue to think with the best that humans have thought. Madeleine showed fine judgment drawing from resources on the internet informed by the whole scope of our philosophical tradition rather than ones that arbitrarily excise everything prior to the 17thC typical of atheist sites.

By refusing to think only in terms dictated by our anti-culture, the thing that has created the conditions within which NA can even be considered respectable, Madeleine shows a precocious independence of thought. And a virile man should not hesitate granting her that.

@AJ Philips I didn't see it that way at all. I'd be more than happy to use it as a teaching tool to introduce the superiority of moral theology over atheistic ethics. It saddens me you don't see the same thing.

Kagan's lack of fluency in theology was telling - philosophical debates on the tension between free will and Grace is thousands of years old. It goes to the prejudice in modern philosophy against Aristotle and Scholasticism and how divorce from God leads it into incoherence (eliminative materialism) and irrelevancy.