You can now listen to the recent Oxford/Cambridge-style formal debate on the proposition “We’d be better off without religion”, thanks to the Time Online. (Note that this is explicitly not the same proposition as “God doesn’t exist”, etc.)
The debate was organized by Intelligence Squared, and had the following participants:
Pro:
- Professor Richard Dawkins
- Professor A.C. Grayling
- Christopher Hitchens
Con:
- Rabbi Julia Neuberger
- Professor Roger Scruton
- Nigel Spivey
Chair: Joan Bakewell
There’s about an hour of debate on two MP3s. Good stuff.
Apparently the pro side was more convincing, since they swayed the room according to votes (and, apparently also got the vote of the Time columnist Ruth Gledhill, who describes herself as someone with no doubt God exists, in her writeup on the debate.)
Since I obviously was pretty firmly in the pro camp before listening, I don’t know first-hand how the debate would seem to anyone undecided, or in the other camp, but I certainly found it interesting listening.
Oh, and while I was rattling around the Times getting the MP3s of the debate, I found this list of other Time Book section podcasts, which I hadn’t seen before. There’s quite a few things on there that I’ve queued up for later listening, including Philip Pullman discussing the adaptation of Ruby in the Smoke for TV, Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens talking about slavery, revolution and the future of the Left, and Niall Ferguson talking about violence in the 20th century.
