DEBATE: Is Christianity Intellectually Defensible? | Dan Barker Vs Stuart Knechtle
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Hey everybody, today we're debating is Christianity intellectually defensible and we are starting right now with Stuart's opening statement. Thanks for being with us. Stuart, the floor is all yours. James, thanks for having me back on. It's been a long time, so looking forward to doing this again. Dan, good to meet you. I think you debated my dad back in maybe the 70s or something and so it's nice to

Nice to have a go with you as well as his son. I remember that name connectly, so yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a tough one to forget. A hard one to pronounce, though. You did a good job right there. So is Christianity intellectually defensible? I believe so. I think you can defend Christianity quite easily, actually. I think Dan started off in our...

conversation talking about the burden of proof. And I think if you have two detectives showing up to a crime scene, you're going to have both laying out evidence for what occurred at the crime scene. You're not going to have one say to the other, oh, you got the burden of the proof. I'm just going to hang out here and just, you know, try and throw pot shots at the evidence that you're bringing to the crime scene. I think another way to put it is

If you're going to say one person is bringing different forms of knowledge to the table and making certain claims, well, then you're going to be postulating if you are disagreeing. And so you're going to have a level of burden of proof. It'll look differently. Sure. But if you're bringing any type of knowledge to the table and trying to make certain presumptuous claims, perhaps both are going to have levels of burden of proof. And so I think that lands on both of us tonight.

even though in one sense I am one who was on the defensive. And so Christianity for me, it really breaks down into a few categories for why I believe it's intellectually defensible and why it's the truth. And one, it starts with the leader, not the Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh, who had all different types of wives. He was a pedophile. His words, let's just say, were slightly sloppy.

He had certain rage about him. He definitely did not pull off the miraculous. But then you look at Jesus Christ, who was not the cult leader, but he was somebody who flipped the entire world upside down. So I don't usually quote him, but Bono of U2, I think is correct. When he stated that, I don't believe that a schizophrenic could change over one third of the entire world to actually believe in him. And he said, you can take that leap of faith if you'd like.

but that over a third of the world believes that he's the son of God. I believe that there's something to that. No, not proof, but something to it. Next, I would say that he spoke and made claims that no other religious figure has come even close to his words on the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5, Robert Coles over at Harvard said that all ethical qualifications statements are simply footnotes.

to the Sermon on the Mount. I don't think that Robert Coles was even a Christian, but one of the more well-known Harvard professors who stated that. I think Shakespeare, all the top writers borrowed in many different ways from Jesus. Obviously, every single narrative you have pretty much in culture today, whether it be fiction and writing or movies from Iron Man to Harry Potter, all have a type of

Christian theological theme to them. Good, evil, the head of good giving up his life for the sake of goodness to continue. Evil looking like it's going to win. But then all of a sudden, this Christ-like figure is able to overcome, be an overcomer. And we're always rooting for the good. And there's something at our very core that wants the good to win. I think that's true for every human being, other than maybe some of those who

have mental pathologies that are really sad. So this Christocentric figure, Jesus Christ, who we see throughout our culture, throughout our music today, why in the world do we still care about somebody who existed 2,000 years ago, who made these crazy claims and who died? And so if he died, we shouldn't be talking about him if he made these claims to the resurrection. No, that was obviously a myth. And like Paul talked about, we should be pitied most amongst men.

But obviously something happened there, just like the great Big Bang. Something occurred. It came out of nowhere, just like the resurrection came out of nowhere and just started this crazy poop storm taking over the Roman Empire overnight, it seems, with thousands of Jews to be the last people in the world, especially at that time, to come and believe in Jesus Christ and a resurrection that was then and there, not a general resurrection at the end of time.

I mean, not a political war hero. They never would have believed in this. Never. Definitely never would have gone to their death for it. Then Jesus made these claims where there were tremendously high-level claims about being God himself, majestic claims, but then humbling himself to the point of being a slave in Philippians chapter 2. A servant dying for humanity? Humanity? That doesn't make any sense. So right out of that, we get Galatians 3.28, neither slave nor free, male nor female.

Greek nor Jew, but all are created in God's image, and that created something called human rights, and something that we live for, Judeo-Christian values that are connected to human rights in our country, and I hope we never lose those. But if we lose the Christian faith, if it becomes, let's just say, not intellectually defensible, and if it becomes what

Paul McCartney said or John Lennon actually said back in the 60s that the more science we get, the more Christianity will leave. Thank heaven he's wrong. He's actually completely wrong. The more science we get, it seems now, the more atheistic scientists are shaking in their little boots saying, oh, gosh, let's not talk about God because the more science we get, it seems like we're getting closer to him rather than the 1500s. You know, the more you talked about science, the smaller God got and the more fearful they were.

That was a quote by a few atheist scientists, by the way, right there. That was just pulling. That wasn't just a quasi-charming little idea I had. So I think the Jesus figure himself is where I start. I think that's the home run for me. But then secondly, the reliability of the Gospels. The events themselves go right up, connected to, within a matter of just a couple years, to the writings. We know the oral eyewitness testimony that was spread online.

Right from the beginning, connected not just to Jerusalem or a small town, but spread across the entire known world. And the message of the resurrection was preached right from the beginning. Jesus was an incredible evidentialist. That's why he would say something like, if you don't believe in me, believe in the miracles themselves, based off that evidence. And so he was never calling for blind, gullible mental assent.

Faith, pistis in the Latin, means trust. He was wanting a trusting, loving relationship with people back then, and he still wants it with us today. And as a mental health therapist, and I do family systems as well, I can tell you right now the idea of a personal God who connects with you, who loves you. I can tell you right now, if you want a type of serious healing at the emotional or relational level,

You bring that God into the office. If you want this idea of just, hey, let's just throw a couple of band-aids here and there. You know, why not a little cognitive behavioral therapy here? Why not a couple of pills here like Sigmund Freud did? And there you go. You'll get some good healing. It's not even close. And even the literature shows that. Even the secular literature shows that. So I think that leads to my next point, which is the experiential side. So you've got the events themselves, the reliability of the Gospels, 5,800 documents. If you count all of them up, it's

Over 20,000 different Coptic and Latin, different languages. So the reliability and then the experiential side. I think the experiential side is so clear for me and my psychological studies. It becomes abundantly clear. I think my favorite form of therapy is existential therapy, logotherapy. Came up with the Viktor Frankl, who was there in the Nazi Germany war camp. Jewish guy.

And he said people were shriveling up and dying in those prisoner of war camps because they were so depressed and they just gave up if they found their meaning and purpose within the camp. Or they became just nasty and mean to everybody and even turn in fellow Jews. But those, oddly enough, who believed in something transcendent that was outside of the prisoner of war camp, not only lived, but had way healthier emotional well-being and actually were 10 times kinder

than those who found meaning and purpose within the camp. And so that's backed up by all the Harvard literature, Dartmouth studies as well recently, where if you have a God of the universe who you worship and believe in, and then you serve and focus on other human beings, which is the whole main purpose of what the Bible talks about, what's the main commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. If you look upward and outward, that is the quickest way to getting rid of depression, anxiety, anxiety,

All different forms of mental pathologies. So I think the experience lines up in my own personal devotional life. You know, when I start, the saddest thing for an atheist is they feel gratitude, but they ultimately have nobody to thank for it. And so when I had a conversation with the famous atheist, Susan Blackmore, she was honest about that.

And how that's kind of depressing. And then she was honest too about having depression over suffering because there is no ultimate answer to suffering. There's no objective wrong in it. She said, there's no answer in the sense of no judgment day. There's no eternity out there. We're wrong. We made right. She just says, this is my experience. Now get up and get on with it, girl. All right. Well, Dan's going to have to obviously say that as well, if he's going to be consistent. So yeah,

That's where I'd start. There's endless amounts more. I think that's a good starting place. But I would start with who's this Jesus character? Are the gospels reliable? And then what is the experiential? I talked about human rights, talked about my devotional life. I talked about the psychology behind it. I mean, you can go on and on. And I think if I was an atheist, I would have all different types of problems in my experience when it came to things like

is justice. How do you really get after justice if there is no God? Morality, right and wrong. How do you really get after an understanding that why in the world would I live to help somebody across the entire world? That doesn't make any sense. I would just stand up for my own tribe. It would be selfish to help a different tribe. The miracles within atheism, in my personal experience,

are absolutely endless. Non-existence produces existence. Chaos produces order. Non-life produces life. Non-reason produces reason. Psychology produces biology. Matter produces morals. Matter produces meaning. Matter produces love. I mean, I could keep going. Endless amounts of miracles within atheism, but there's no miracle worker.

I mean, at least we got some magician pulling the bunny out of the hat. The atheist has not even a single magician. So that's the experiential side where I just I shiver at the idea of, you know, again, Dan seems like a very nice guy. Excellent guy. A nice level of buoyancy about him. But I feel like if you're consistent, you'd be more like the Camus, the Sartre's and the Nietzsche's.

Thank you very much for that opening statement. And folks, before we kick it over to Mr. Barker for his opening as well, I want to let you know, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, I'm your host, Dr. James Coons. I want to say we hope you or we appreciate you being here no matter what walk of life you are from, whether you be Christian, atheist, you name it. We're glad that you are here. If you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button as we have many more debates coming up. And with that, we're going to kick it over to Mr. Barker. Thanks for being with us. The floor is all yours, Dan.

So before you start the clock, let me ask you, have you properly introduced both of us to your viewers? Do they know who we are? Is it up on the screen or what? That's a great question. To be honest, we usually, because of the fast-paced nature of YouTube, people wanting the...

kind of like get to the debate, we usually actually just jump right into it. However, I am happy to read your Wikipedia entry if that would... Well, maybe each of us could just give a 30-second introduction of who we are. I mean, how do the viewers even know who they're listening to? Yeah.

I mean, I agree with you in a lot of cases, although both of you guys are so popular that I'd be surprised if they hadn't. But I do agree with you. There are probably some people who maybe haven't heard of you guys. So I'm happy to lead with that if you're open to it. Otherwise, if you'd like to, the floor is yours. I've got your Wikipedia page open. Well, Stuart, why don't you just tell us very quickly who you are, what you do and why you were even invited to this? Yeah, yeah. So I'm a pastor.

In New Canaan, Connecticut, and I guess known for what I do on college campuses with my dad across the country. And in the social media age in the last few years, we have, I think it's definitely Holy Spirit driven. I don't think we're as talented as our following shows. Logan Paul, Tucker Carlson, Friends of the Trumps, and

Many different connections have come because of social media. And so we are pushing faith, proselytizing, pushing faith down throats. No, we're trying to be as sensitive and approachable as possible when it comes to sharing faith and why we think the Christian faith is so important and not just important, but it's true. And so we do the college campus thing and then we go on a lot of different podcasts and a lot of different conversations with a lot of different kind of cultural figures and

So that's what we do. Great. Well, I'll just tell you a little bit about myself. I used to be an ordained Christian minister. I preached for 19 years, and I believed very much like Stuart believes. Of course, no two Christians agree on just about everything, but I think I was pretty much in your camp, Stuart. I was on fire for Jesus. I was a co-pastor of three churches. I was an evangelist for eight years. I was a Christian missionary.

And I also wrote some Christian musicals, a lot of music by Word Records. And in fact, I'm still getting royalties today from some of that music back in the 70s, which is pretty fun. And then I went through a period of re-evaluation where I learned that my faith was basically built on the sand. Christianity is not true. It is not defensible. There is some truth in Christianity, of course. There's some truth in all religions. But...

I kind of painfully became a non-theist and an atheist. Today, I am co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin. My wife, Annie-Laurie Gaylor, and I, we just celebrated 38th anniversary. We are co-presidents, and we work to keep state and church separate and to educate the public about the views of non-theists. And in the educational side, I am...

I do a lot of public speaking, too. In fact, I debated your dad. I think it was in Minnesota. I remember that debate. He was like an on-fire kind of guy. I remember that.

And funny. He had the audience laughing a lot. That was good. And I have done 141 formal public moderated debates since 1985. That includes Islamic scholars and some rabbis, mostly Christian apologists. So I have a lot of books out. I have books on morality and on free will. I have books on my story. And you can find out more about me at

the homepage of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. So we can start the clock now, is that good? All right. So thank you, Stuart, you're very articulate and you're a very magnetic personality, and that goes a long way when you're using rhetoric to try to impress people. And I think a little bit of what you said is related to our topic tonight, although most of it I don't think it was. I think you did a pretty good job of explaining

how Christianity is explicable about why it's here and the impact that it has. And I think you get very little in terms of why it's defensible, which I think that's our topic tonight, why is Christianity defensible? You mentioned Jesus. I would suggest that besides Jesus, if Christians also have to respect the other biblical leaders, I mean, Moses, for example, and Paul and others. So Jesus, of course, is defensible.

He called himself the Christ, assuming that he did exist. And when you're talking about Christianity, we have a topic, is Christianity defensible? What do we mean by Christianity? There are so many different versions of it. There's the Roman Catholic version, the one true church, the Roman Catholic version. There's, I don't know how many hundreds of Christian sects and denominations that

who don't agree with each other, who have split off from each other, who have fought with each other, who have murdered each other, who have had holy wars killing each other. Some of the most horrible religious atrocities were not Christians killing Muslims or Christians killing infidels. It was Christians killing other Christians. So, you know, we're not asking if Christianity is pragmatic or useful. We're asking whether the actual teachings are defensible. But, you know,

you use an argument that amounts to where there's smoke, there's fire, right? Well, how did this big religion come into being if there wasn't something that happened? Well, something did happen.

We can say the same thing with Islam. Something did happen in the 6th century with the Prophet Muhammad, the so-called Prophet Muhammad. And look at the impact of Islam all over the world. Look at the billions of believers, faithful followers. We could look at Joseph Smith and the Church of Mormon. Look at that. Actually, something did happen with Joseph Smith. He did tell those stories, and the church did grow from that. So I don't know if it really follows...

from the argument that where there's smoke there's fire, that that necessarily relates to the truth of the claims or even the defensibility of the claims of any particular religion.

Look at Hinduism, look at the Buddha, look at the, what, more than a billion good people, smart people who are followers of Ganesh and Shiva and the Hindu gods. How do you explain that massive worldwide growth of that religion if something did not happen? Well, duh, something did happen. World religions are started because there are some kind of leaders or movements that

And I don't think we can really credit Jesus with what happened. I think we can credit the followers. You know, we can credit Paul.

And then, of course, we can credit Constantine. I mean, without Constantine, what would the Christian church have looked like today? Constantine at the time was a pagan emperor, and he only converted at the very last second. And even during his time, the Christian sects were fighting with each other and disagreeing, and they finally had to have that Council of Nicaea where they sort of hammered into shape, this will be the Orthodox Christianity, and the Gnostics and the others have to go.

So your approach to the topic, I think, is minimal. I mean, it's passionate, but Jesus, let's look at Jesus. I would say, and I would have said as a Christian pastor, that really a Christian is a person who follows Christ. That's what a Christian means.

Of course, every group thinks they're following Christ, right? The Mormons think they're following Christ. The snake handlers, they think they're following Christ. And they will tell you. They will prove it in the book of Mark, right? And so there's all these divisions and fights. I even heard of a church, Church of Christ,

that had a split over whether or not the communion cup should have a handle. You can't think of a church today that's not a split off of something, except maybe Orthodox, Christian Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox Church, because they're still in Greek. They still do it in Greek. So Jesus...

said some good things. You mentioned love the Lord your God with all your heart. He was basically going back to the covenant, the early Deuteronomic covenant when he said that, and then love your neighbor as yourself. I would submit that if you love the Lord your God with all your heart, you cannot love your neighbor as yourself because God is above your neighbor.

And we see through history, we even see through the Hebrew scriptures, that those followers of Yahweh did not love their neighbors as themselves. They killed them, they murdered them, they raped them, they cannibalized them in the scripture proudly and happily. The psalmist even said, happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the stone.

So if you love God first, and even in Deuteronomy, even in that covenant, you see there were these blessings that were promised, but then there were four times as many curses. God promised that if you don't bow down to me and follow me, these horrible things are going to happen to you. Read that covenant and see that. What if a wedding vow? What if a husband and wife got together and said, I promise to love you, but if you even look at another person,

I'm going to smite you and tear your hair out and spread dog poop on your face, and I'm not making this up. That stuff's in the Bible. So it is a religion, really, of submission and obedience. And even you mentioned Paul. Paul called himself a slave of Christ. And you refer to Galatians, you know, there's neither slave nor free, male nor female. That specific verse applied only to

to baptize Christians. And a few verses later, it explicitly excludes the Arabs, the son from the slave woman rather than the son from his first wife. It's a very exclusive, divisive, patriarchal religion. Jesus showed us his compassion. If he's the model, he showed us how compassionate he is or was, or at least what his followers thought he was in Luke chapter 12 when he said,

There are some slaves that you should not beat as hard as other slaves because they didn't know the master's will. And I think that shows a little bit of concern. If they didn't know better, don't beat them as hard. You beat them a little bit, right? Jesus endorsed slavery. He never denounced it. He incorporated it into his parables as if it were the most natural thing, which it was at that time. We all know that the southern slave owners in our country quoted those pro-slavery Bible verses

to defend their economic system in South Carolina, and Florida, and Georgia, and all these other southern states. And in fact, the Bible was... Abraham Lincoln showed the Bible was hurled on both sides. The Bible is not a good moral guide. You can't find real humanistic moral values in the Bible or in any of the teachings of Jesus. That phrase, "Love your neighbor as yourself," if you look at what he was quoting,

Because he was referring back to, he said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. And so he was quoting his own father, his own self.

You see that that neighbor that was being spoken about was not your real neighbor. It was your Israelite neighbor. Love your Hebrew neighbor as yourself. But you can buy slaves from neighboring countries. That did not apply to loving everybody in the whole world. It applied basically to the in-group. And all religious groups do that. Jews love the Jews. The Hindus love the Hindus. The Christians love the Christians. And

So that's not really a very lofty moral teaching when you think about it. Jesus talked about cutting off body parts. He even encouraged some men to castrate themselves. If you look at it, he said, he that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Jesus popularized the concept of hell. Anybody who did not submit completely to this slave master God who demands total conformity, and Paul even said,

bring into captivity every thought into the obedience of Christ. Anybody who did not submit was going into a lake of fire, Jesus said. This is a brutal, violent religion that if you don't bow down to him, there's no freedom of thought. You won't find any recognition anywhere in the Bible

that human beings deserve to be treated respectfully and have value in themselves. Human beings are worms and sinners and rotten. You won't find any good moral principles in there. And the Beatitudes, most of them are contingent principles.

on future reward. Blessed are you for this so that you will be rewarded. Not because there's any intrinsic worth in human beings. The Beatitudes have some truth and all religious teachings have some truth. But I think on balance, if we can even define what Christianity is and excluding those that Stuart thinks are not true Christians, let's say,

How can we say that Christianity is intellectually defensible when we don't even know what we're talking about and we can't even respect the religious leaders that are in the Bible, that book that Christianity is based on. Like Moses, he was a tyrant. When Korah asked a simple question, if you know in Numbers 16, some of the followers, Korah asked Moses the same question that Martin Luther asked the Pope.

Why do we have intermediaries? Why can't God speak directly to the people? Why not? Why do we have to go through Moses and Aaron? And did Moses give an intellectually defensible response? Did he explain himself? You know what he did, if you've read that chapter. He got angry. He cursed them. You should not defy my authority. God only talks to me and Aaron. And the rest of you have to just learn from us. There's that patriarchal kind of

cult leader mentality that you have. Even Jesus had that mentality. And so what happened? Korah and his followers were destroyed. The earth opened up

And they were dropped in and smashed. They were killed. That's what happens in Christianity and in the Bible if you dare ask a simple, honest question. The same question that Martin Luther asked, I think you, Stuart, admire Martin Luther's question. Can't God speak directly to the people? Moses said, no, he couldn't. So I could go on for hours and hours. You really misrepresent atheists.

There is no good, solid scientific or medical evidence that faith in God makes people healthier or happier. In fact, the opposite seems to be the truth. If you look at the countries of the world, as the sociologist Phil Zuckerman points out, that are the least religious tend to be the most happy, the most moral. They have most equality, more women's rights. Look at Denmark, where only about 4% of the Danes

actually believe in a God, although many of them call themselves cultural Christians. About half of them, they might get married in the church, but they don't believe. And yet, without God, they are good Christians.

meaningful people. And the members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation that I know would find, Stuart, would find your comments quite offensive. If you look at our lives, millions of good, happy, moral, family-loving people don't believe in God, and yet we have hope, we have purpose, we have a solid basis for morality. And maybe we can talk about that later. I wrote a whole book about it called Mere Morality.

And we have meaning in our lives, which is better than the meaning that comes from bowing down and submitting yourself to a slave master. That's not meaning. That's just following orders. And if you think following orders is what gives your life meaning, then you have an intrinsically meaningless life because it doesn't reside within yourself.

So we can talk more about that as well. But on balance, even though there is some good teachings in the Bible, I admit that. In fact, I would even quote some of them sometimes in some of my atheistic speeches. On balance, it is not a good moral guide. It is not intellectually defensible. And I wish we had, maybe we'll have more time to talk about some more stories that are in this book upon which Christianity is based. Is my time up?

And with that, I want to say thank you very much for that opening, Mr. Barker. And folks, I want to let you know, if you had not noticed at the bottom of the screen, we're very excited to share that Modern Day Debate is collaborating with different universities. If you happen to be on a university as a student or faculty and you're like, hey, we'd love to have a huge debate on our college campus.

Reach out to moderndaydebate at gmail.com as we are wanting to collaborate with universities across the U.S. and perhaps outside of the U.S. Check out that graphic at the bottom right of your screen for more. We're going to kick it over to Stuart for his six-minute rebuttal. Stuart, the floor is all yours. I thought it really interesting that Dan said, I used to be a pastor of three churches, and I was kind of sad about losing God, but then I sort of had to grow up.

Well, then why are you spending your whole life with your wife fighting against God if you're sad about losing him, firstly? And then secondly, if you don't even believe in him, why are you angry at him? Both seem very mysterious and kind of strange to me. Now, if you are trying to convince me and many others to see the light and that we're living in darkness—

And to come to a form of humanism where we can be better people and not believe in the pink elephant. And if that's your whole life goal, okay, then great. Then that's another discussion. But I didn't really get that out of you. I kind of got this interesting quagmire of contradictions, it seemed like.

There are endless amounts of things I can go through here that Dan said. I mean, Luke chapter 12, Jesus doesn't endorse or condemn slavery. I've never even heard that. Someone bring that up before. Paul is usually the one who's condemned for being pro-slavery. Instead, Jesus is using simply the master-servant relationship as a parable to teach about the importance of being prepared and faithful for his return. He's not talking at all about slavery. Secondly, Dan brought up how God is just for the in-crowd.

I don't know where he's getting. I mean, look at Richard Bauckham, considered by many atheists and Christians to be the top New Testament scholar in the world. N.T. Wright is right there as well. All these guys are communicating as being consistent to the Old and especially the New Testament that right from the get-go, Genesis chapter 12 and onward,

You have the Israelites are the chosen people, but in no way are the Jews this messianic type where they are the first ones in line to heaven. No, it's simply by God's grace that they were chosen and they're on equal footing with every other nation. And so it's an exclusive form of chosenness. But then it became the most inclusive worldview known at the time period and still remains today. Name a more exclusive, inclusive worldview than Christianity, and I will pay you handsomely.

Next, if you're saying, again, it's all for the in crowd, then how do you explain parable of the good Samaritan? How do you explain Jesus calling all the little kids to himself? How do you explain John chapter four, the woman at the well being the first Samaritan when Samaritan woman, no money, prostitute.

I'm sorry. I'm pretty sure Jesus is shattering every single different type of layer that Dan is talking about in terms of Jesus only coming for this in crowd. R and Ross said the same thing to me, and I didn't mean to get a gotcha moment on him, but it was a serious gotcha moment that he did not come back from this whole atheistic. It's kind of a militant new atheism where it's just for the in crowd that is, that is being so intellectually inconsistent that,

It's scary to me. Next, Dan, I think, talked about how you're not allowed to talk to God, and that was shown in the Old Testament.

and that it's rude to, and he would condemn you for it. Then why in the world does Elijah get spoken to by God and not condemned for turning his back and wanting to kill himself after defeating the prophets of Baal? Why in the world does Job get the whisper? Why in the world, throughout, I could go endless examples. Why does David over and over again say, God, get away from me? How long, O Lord? Why in the world does David, for example, Psalm 88, say, death is my only friend? Why does Hezekiah say, from everlasting to everlasting, I thought you were, O Lord?

but you're clearly not. Why in the world does Job completely diss God the entire first half of Job? And God just allows it. It's like he encourages people to diss him. Why in the world do you have the persistent widow? Why do you have endless examples of knocking, pounding down God's door and God's listening? Not only listening, but he understands how you speak when you are desperate and says, God,

Give it to me. Give it to me. So I don't know what in the world kind of God Dan has. If he was a pastor at three different churches, I think he's I think he knows some of this. Maybe not all of it, but he knows some of it. And I don't I don't know if you're being honest with me right now. Next would be in terms of the slate. Oh, you brought up bashing kids. There's just some, again, total misinterpretations that Dan is bringing up.

Psalm 73, when David talks about bashing baby's heads on rocks, he's not saying, I physically want to go grab a baby and just start throwing and pounding against a rock. No, he's saying that that's what the Canaanites did to us. And contextually, if you look at it, he's saying, God, I wish...

that that could be done now to them. So what he's doing is what he does throughout the Psalms, which he's had these types of murderous types of dreams and frustrations because of what's been done to him. And he has these depressive ones as well. But then he has these beautiful ones where he's worshiping God and telling God to forgive his enemies over and over again. So he's this mixed bag like we all are. I think of depression, anxiety and rage at times.

And so, Dan, you could pick many other verses that would be harder to work through, but that one's pretty simple.

And then crediting Paul and Constantine, for example. Constantine didn't convert to the end of his life because he wanted to get baptized at the end of his life without sinning because he thought that baptism would get him into heaven. So it had nothing to do with like a slow conversion. Constantine accepted Christianity because Christianity had already spread across the entire known world. He didn't popularize Christianity. No, he saw the cross and the shield and he said, oh man, this is kind of nice. There's a lot of Christians here that I can get...

political power through here. And it wasn't even him who ended ultimately persecution. Persecution started up after Constantine. Diocletian, for example, was the one who really started persecution. And yet Christianity lasted way beyond, I mean, way beyond any form of persecution. So

So Dan, when he brings up that I'm talking about the pragmatics here, and that doesn't have anything to do with the topic. Well, firstly, most every atheist I hear in a debate always puts to the Christian. I don't know if that was the topic. Now, I could tell you why I think that they say that.

But secondly, this is the topic I am talking about right now. Dan picked on my third point, which was more the pragmatic. The first two were everything to do with the intellectually defensibility of it. And that was who is Jesus? What were his claims? Was he the son of God? And then secondly, are the gospels reliable or not?

Then we can go to the resurrection, but simply for the sake of time, I don't have it. Instead, I went to, okay, yes, I think the experiential side is very important. I do think it has to do, not as much so as the first two, but also has to do with, yes, if the experiential and existential lines up with your own type of lifestyle, then that gives credence to the worldview. Thank you very much for that rebuttal. We'll kick it over to Dan for his six-minute rebuttal as well. Dan, the floor is all yours.

So, Stuart, a little bit of your rebuttal was ad hominem, really, attacking me as a person rather than sticking to the issues. And I don't know if that's allowable within a debate, but that's up to the moderator. In fact, you do have the burden of proof. I do not. The atheist is not claiming, the atheist is not making a positive statement. The atheist is simply saying, I do not believe. I am an atheist. A theist is a believer. Right?

And theism is a belief. And so I don't have that belief. I am atheistic. In any discussion, the burden of proof is on the shoulders of the one making the claim.

And the one who's simply not making the claim, I think you mischaracterize atheism. Atheism isn't saying, I can prove there's no God, or I know there's no God. Atheism is simply saying, I'm absent a belief in a God. And by that definition, I have nothing to prove. You have something to prove. And then, of course, most of the atheistic responses are rebuttals to your supposed claims. In Luke chapter 12...

Jesus indeed used the word slave, doulos. He was not talking about just a servant. He was talking about a slave. How many servants can you beat hard and soft? He was talking about manually, physically beating people, whether you want to call it a servant or a slave. And he never denounced slavery anywhere in his life. He never said it was a bad idea. It took up until the American Civil War in our country to realize that the Bible is wrong.

Those southern slave owners are wrong about slavery. In fact, you know the Southern Baptist Church split off of Baptist Church because they wanted to endorse slavery and they quoted the Bible in order to defend their position. In fact, some of them still do. So, you mentioned Job, which I find kind of comical. I mean, it is sort of a comical book. There's no real moral tale in the book of Job. And

I think probably one of the most damning verses in the entire Bible is in Job chapter 2. I think it's the third verse. You know where Satan was roaming the earth and he came to God and said, look at your servant Job. And God was saying, Job is my poster child. Look at him. No matter what happens, he has faith in me. And you know the bet that was made and Satan went out and hurt Job and he came back and said, see. And then in verse 3, verse

God said, admitted to Satan that you prompted me to destroy Job for no reason. That's the words.

God took Satan's bat to destroy a man's life for no reason. His 10 children were killed. His cattle was killed. He was made sick. And yet, praise God, Job did not give up his faith. He did not sin with his lips, it said. That is a horrible verse in the Bible, a horrible book in the Bible. The only moral teaching in there, the only thing you might want to call defensible is that

At the end of the book, God is powerful. He can do what he wants. And Job says, yes, you are powerful. You can do what you want. And God says, right answer. So since you submit to me and you bow down to me, then I'm going to give you back 10 more children. I mean, that's a horrible moral teaching. So the fact that God spoke with Job really is no indication that God did not have in place, at least in Moses' time, a structural hierarchy there.

that Korah was objecting to. The reliability of the Gospels, you are exaggerating. I'm sure you know there's a lot of biblical criticism about the reliability of the Gospels, when they were written, how they were written. There are many internal contradictions in the Gospels. And yes, I know as a born-again Christian, I would have said there's no contradictions because you can always find a way to weasel out of a contradiction. The worst example of

of biblical unreliability and indefensibility is the resurrection story. It's told at least five different times. And I've written in some of my books, and in fact, I even have online a challenge called an Easter challenge. So look at the at least 17 times

irreconcilable contradictions among those gospel accounts in the resurrection stories. And even conservative scholars admit, "Yeah, we can't explain this." It doesn't mean the story didn't happen. It doesn't mean that they were all wrong, but it does mean that some of them got it wrong, which means that it is not as reliable as you are pretending that it is. And I would challenge you, Stuart, to take that Easter challenge and come up with an explanation for how in the world they could have gotten things

So badly. So do I have another minute? Yeah, I don't see the clock ticking here. And by the way, it wasn't just believers in the concentration camps in Germany. I just read a book about an atheist church.

prisoner in Auschwitz who found meaning and found purpose and found love, who did not believe in God, who did not have a higher purpose, but did have a real purpose of living his life. And he was the first escapee from Auschwitz. It's quite a story, by the way. And he never credited God. He never credited his faith in God. He credited his smarts, his thinking, his analysis. He used his brain to get himself out of that situation. And in fact, he ended up saving

probably many thousands of Hungarian lives who were about to be put on those trains because of him escaping and giving those plans

you know, to the rest of the world, he did save a lot of lives. So it's not just faith in God that gives people meaning and hope and joy and purpose and love. You are grossly misrepresenting the lives of atheists. I wonder if you even know any, you know, in their personal lives, because it's quite insulting what you say about us. Not that that makes your argument wrong. It's just that your approach is a bit off-putting, Stuart.

Thank you very much for that rebuttal from Mr. Barker. And we're going to jump into the 45-minute dialogue. Folks, this is just a free-for-all. And I want to let you know about a couple of housekeeping things. We'll have a Q&A afterwards. If you have any questions, feel free to submit them in the live chat with me.

tagging at Modern Day Debate, or you can use the Super Chat as those get pushed to the top of the list. And we are going to do a reverse format switch toward the end compared to what we usually do, as Mr. Barker was kind enough to allow the more formal traditional format to

in which the affirmative gets both the very first speech and also the very last speech. So that's why we will have that switch at the end. It is on purpose. And with that, we'll jump into the open dialogue. Gentlemen, the floor is all yours. All right, so one thing that Dan said that I didn't touch on in the beginning that he spent the majority of his time on, so I'd be happy to touch on it right now since he spent the majority of his time on it, is Christians can't really believe on anything. Endless amounts of agree on anything.

Endless amounts of splits, church splits. And so how can you even have this kind of religion? I spend about 5% of my time on that, not the majority. Okay, I heard you come back to it multiple times. All right, so maybe I misheard then. I don't know. So that only strengthens my faith. Okay, Stuart, you're crazy. Why in the world does that strengthen your faith? Because that's exactly what Jesus said was going to happen when he walked this planet.

The majority of his time, if you look in the New Testament, the Gospels, he's actually speaking about religious hypocrisy outside of like commanding fear not and those types of things. But hypocrisy is at the very top of the list. And so if there was no hypocrisy and division, you know, his final words of the Father, John chapter 17, I just pray that they are one as you and I are one, although I know that's going to take a miracle. I mean, everything about Jesus saying this is the sinful human heart. You're going to have to grapple with it. It's going to take a miracle to heal the sinful human heart.

And then Paul is dealing with broken churches who Dan's exactly right. Some were snake handling. Others had a guy sleeping with his mother-in-law. Endless amounts of grotesque things going on in the early church. And so again, it gets back to, well, Dan didn't like second point he brought up that I haven't touched on yet is the grotesque nature that the Bible says we have. Well, okay, fine. Don't call it sin. Don't call it grotesque. Don't call it dirty, rotten. You use that. That was a little bit of an ad hominem. I thought, okay.

Fine, don't use that. You got to call it something. And my favorite atheist humanist said to me not too long ago, Stuart, my kids in middle school have never sinned. They've never done anything wrong. And I said, well, you don't believe in sin and you don't believe in objective morality, objective right and wrong. So I agree with you. Your kids have never done anything wrong.

Doesn't mean they're not good kids. Again, Dan's misrepresenting me, saying that I think that atheists are horrible people. No, there's I was just at a party where there's 25 atheists who are hanging out with agnostics. Pardon my jumping in. I just want to be short just to keep the flow of the dialogue. Sure, sure. I was closing on this. So I was just going to say, Dan, those are two of my rebuttals to, I think, two misrepresentations of what I was talking about.

And so I'd love to hear your response. I did not say that you claimed that atheists are horrible people. You claim that atheists don't have any basis for morality or for justice or for hope. And that is untrue. How's that untrue? In fact, I think we have an even better basis than some unknown, unprovable deity in the sky who has nothing to offer except follow my orders. What's that basis? Well, what justice or morality or what?

Both. So humanism, which I think is the only real defensible moral system, humanism is based on real human harm, human needs and wants and desires and human well-being. So morality, and I wrote a book called Mere Morality. You can tell I was mirroring C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. That if you strip morality down to its core...

There's more to it than that, of course. Morality really boils down to acting with the intention of minimizing harm. That's what we mean by morality. Morality does not mean following orders, because whose orders? Morality does not mean virtue.

Morality really, for example, suppose you're looking at all these different religions in the world or moral philosophies or atheistic groups and you want to judge their morality. What standard, what yardstick are you going to use to judge? You're going to use harm. Oh, this religion is causing more unnecessary harm than this one. And we all know that in our brains. That's how we evolve. We evolve to try to minimize and avoid harm. We even have instincts. You stick your hand in the fire and

you don't have to deliberate, oh look, that heat is damaging the cells of my fingers. It would be prudent for me to withdraw my hand from the fire because otherwise it would compromise the ability of this limb to function. No, without thought we instinctively, normally as human beings, recoil from harm. We can't avoid harm in our lives, but the act of intending to live in such a way that you are minimizing real harm in the real world

It's measurable. And it can be definable. And it can be thousands of different things. It can be pollution. It can be war. It can be disease. It can be natural disasters. It can be oppression. You name it. There are a lot of things that threaten and harm us.

The the act of trying to minimize that or hopefully to eliminate it, if we could. That is what we mean by being moral. Moral does not mean obeying what daddy says, because what if daddy's wrong? Daddy can be wrong. And I think many of the moral teachings of the Bible are are wrong. They are morally wrong, reprehensible. And Dan, you've had a higher level debates than this. Come on. We're playing. We're swimming in the shallow end right now. Let's go to the deep end. Let's take the floaties off real quick.

I am not saying what daddy says. I'm not saying the Abrahamic covenant. I'm not saying it was the same type of relationship as back then. I am talking a moral transcendent source type morality. So it's interesting that you keep saying who says my friend,

Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, definitely not a Christian, he would throw that right back on you and say, whoa, Christians have a type of moral transcendence or Hindus do. Muslims do. Jews do. Atheists do not. So you have the who says on you. And it's either Dan Barker, Stuart Kinectly, James Coons, Donald Trump.

So it's either you, me, culture, or those in power, or it's outside of space and time. It's a moral transcendent source. Call it the daddy in the sky. Call it a computer. I don't care what you call it, but it has to be a moral transcendent source that's immaterial that brings objective morality. That's why Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., so many people, so many of our leaders in the past, the greatest leaders in the past have stated clearly that

that you have to have a law above the law in order to judge the racist laws of Alabama at the time, or you just have to say, oh, who says? Who says? The culture or those in power, they say. That's not what I'm saying, Stuart. You're misinterpreting. I'm saying there is a standard. I'm not misinterpreting because that was concerning. There is a standard. I'm saying there is a moral standard, and it's not transcendent. It is natural. It's the world we live in.

And those people who think that you need a transcendent law in order to justify moral values, they are wrong about that. Dan, I just need you to tell me what does that mean? It's just natural. And then I need you to tell me – you kept talking about harm. What is harm? Is pornography harmful? I gave you some examples. Those two questions. Natural?

You can't give me two examples. I need more examples than that because I could name a million things right now that we could disagree on over what is harmful. You're not listening. I just gave you a number of examples. I could give you many that would be disagreeing with that, though. Listen, listen a minute. You have to be – if you're going to do a debate, you have to be open to at least trying to understand the other person's point of view.

But not if it's nonsense. You have to be open, Stuart. You can't just be a preacher. Yeah, you can't be a preacher either. You've just switched shoes. You're preaching, Dan. You're preaching just as much as you always have. You're just preaching from the other camp now. I was replying to your question. You're just as much as a proselytizer as you've always been, but you're on the other camp. Is that bad? Is it bad to be a proselytizer? No, I like it. I appreciate it.

And I hope you're trying to convince me. You are trying to convince me to be an atheist right now, right? No, I am not. Well, you're not a proselytizer then. No, I'm not. I'm trying to respond to the questions that you ask me. Why, if this is truth that you have, would you not try and convince me to be an atheist? Because I think people should be judged not by their beliefs, but by their actions. I don't care if you want to believe in Mother Goose or the Tooth Fairy. I don't care what you believe. My actions, I'm pro-slavery. I'm pro-white supremacy.

According to you, I'm pro-white supremacy and slavery based off of my teachings, based off of the teachings that I follow. You said the teachings. The Bible is pro-slavery, but you are not. Okay, I'm a Christian. I take the Bible literally. I get my ethics from the Bible. You're calling me a racist.

I am not. I am saying that you are better than the Bible. You are smarter than the Bible. You have risen above those horrible, racist, slavery ideas because of the Enlightenment and modern humanistic values. It's a good thing you are not like Jesus. It's a good thing you are smarter than Jesus.

kinder than the God of the Bible. I'm giving you credit. I'm complimenting you for rising above those horrible, brutal teachings that we all now know and Jesus did not know are morally wrong. But can I answer your question? You asked me a number of questions. I asked you two.

Natural and harm. Natural is the material world that we all experience. When you just touched your nose, you had a natural experience, right? It's the physical world. Atoms, molecules, forces, and all of that, right? We live in that world. We are biological organisms. We are physical animals in a biological world that is natural. It's an open question whether there's something supernatural. I don't think there is, but that's never been demonstrated or proved. But

Harm is natural. Harm is pain. It is hurt. It is suffering. It is disease. It is war. It is oppression. I can name for you a thousand different things that are harmful. Chemicals that a company dumps into the water. Pornography, if it is oppressing and harmful.

the people that are involved in it, if they are being harmed in some way, then yes, I would judge it as a humanist to be a harmful thing. If there's no real harm involved, then it comes down to your moral sensibilities rather than actual measurable harm in the real world.

You don't have a standard of morality. All you have is a lawgiver who tells you do this or do that, like a commanding officer in the military. You don't have a moral compass of your own if you're not using your brain and your reason and moral principles to judge the consequences of action. You're just being a good little boy because God tells you to do this. That is the opposite of

And by the way, most religious moral systems are based on punishment and reward. If you don't follow this Lord, you're going to suffer. You're going to go to hell. Even Jesus said that. There's going to be a fire. There's going to be horrible pain. And I think any system of morality that makes its point by threatening violence, like Jesus did, is a morally bankrupt system. There's a better way to live, a more practical, more measurable way to live your life than Christianity.

And I'm so sorry. You have a very, you have a broken wing. And I hope I'm sounding genuine when I say that. I am sorry that the church hurt you. It did not hurt me. It hurt you. It hurt you. Whether you realize it or not, you have a tremendously strong emotional bias. No, no. You can sit here until you're blue in the face. As a psychotherapist, I can promise you, I can, I can see your brain right now. No, you can't. You have been harmed a long time.

the way no you would not speak as passionately you would not rip so many passages out of scripture so poorly you know this stuff and you are being completely disingenuous this whole idea of be a little good boy and just do as god says so i mean come that is richard dawkins 2001 type stuff

That even Richard would say, oh, yeah, that was that was about 26 years ago or whatever. I'm sorry. And so so that that idea is so absurd. I don't go to my little magical book, the Bible, to tell me what house I'm about to get. There are endless amounts of ways that God says, for example, the Egyptian midwives. I think things get a little ethically unclear. Like, I don't think it's as black and white as you say so.

And for me to just go to my magical Bible, I'm sorry, your hatred towards the church, or maybe you don't have any hatred, but you're disgust with parts of the biblical doctrine. That's just you being a pastor. That's just anybody living off of the Judeo Christian roots that you are claiming to be a humanist, but humanism is simply living off the fumes of Judeo Christian values. And so it's so funny for me to sit back here and just listen to your righteous indignation over these passages. And I'm thinking,

Why are you so angry, bro? Why are you standing for this immaterial source of justice? We need it. I hate the idea of hell. Eternal condemnation. Now you're getting back. Something is so I'll just close with this. Something is so unnatural about slavery. Dan, wake up and smell the coffee, my friend. Nothing's unnatural about slavery. Every single civilization had slavery. What was supernatural? What?

was when the Israelites and then the Christians and then all the major, find me historically, one abolitionist movement that wasn't Christian. Just one.

There were a number of them. There's not a single one. It was the Quakers. It was William Wilberforce. It was Lincoln. And so all of a sudden what you have there is people saying, wait a second, this should not be natural. According to your law, Dan, according to your law, which by the way, another inconsistency, you're taking the immaterial, the moral law, trying to pull it from the natural physical law. Impossible, my friend, absolutely impossible. And so for you to make this Royal leap, you're taking so many leaps based off of a fate based off of this science of the gaps, right?

There's just like, there's not enough time. It's nine o'clock. We'd have to go to 1 a.m. to just completely dilute all these. So I would just sit with pornography, pornography and so many issues. Like if you're going to define a whole moral system based off of Dan Barker's great brain, Stuart's great brain,

I could go right to pornography, something that's most relevant with guys my age right now. Okay, well, women get STDs and there's very high rates of suicide. Give me Stuart. Before we jump fully into this new subtopic, I do want to be sure that Dan gets a chance to respond to the points that you mentioned. Yes, yes, please.

So I never said slavery was unnatural. I said it's immoral. Of course it's natural. It's happened. It happens in other species. Welcome to It Takes Energy, presented by Energy Transfer, where we talk all things oil and natural gas. Oil and gas drive our economy, ensure our country's security, and open pathways to brighter futures.

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Even the slaves themselves knew, with maybe a few exceptions. Even the slaves themselves knew. What I say was slavery is immoral, and Jesus did not know it was immoral in his day. He accepted it as a perfectly natural thing. It's a good thing we have risen above that. But now I forgot the other question. You asked two questions. What is natural, and what was the other question? Oh, harm. Yeah, harm. What's harm? According to who?

According to Dan, if you ingest a chemical that is harmful to your body, that's harm, right? If a company is dumping chemicals in a river, we would say that's immoral. Why? Because it's harming human lives.

And so harm, I'll list them again. It can be natural disaster. It can be war. It can be slavery. It can be beating. It can be hurting. It can be oppression. It can even be patriarchy. It can even be many religious teachings cause harm. Look at some of the Muslim teachings, the way that they treat. So harm, in fact, you were just trying to give an example with pornography, which might be a little off the topic.

You were raising natural harmful effects, weren't you? You were judging the morality of it based on what is a natural metric, not based on some edict from above.

So I know you don't go to the Bible to look at how to live your life. I know that you, most of the time in your life, even though you pretend that God is your guide, most of the time you are using humanistic morality. You are using the harm principle, looking at the consequences. This is how we judge whether someone's guilty in a court of law. So

The only sense you can make of morality is by looking at the natural world. Who made the rule that a moral law must have a transcendent source? We have many laws that don't have transcendent sources. There are laws based on experience. The Magna Carta goes way back as an early example of how the king's policies were harming the barons, and so they had to come up with a system to counteract those natural laws.

Law. So most of the atheists that I know, and I know there's some nihilists in the group, a few, and there's some bad eggs in every group. There's bad Christians too. You know that.

But every atheist that I know looks at you and is curious, like, why do we need this? We have good lives. We have happy lives. We have loving families. You don't need it. You don't need it. You don't need it. I agree with them. I'm sorry. I didn't understand you were talking over me. I didn't understand you. Well, I had to cut you off. You've been going for a while now.

I literally, I agree with those atheists. Now you're putting words in my mouth. Well, then you agree that we have a base. We have a basis for moral, meaningful, purposeful lives. My whole point is that there are the ultimate argument for God and Christ. The ultimate argument is all of the arguments combined.

And this is one of many. You're getting at morality and you're defining immorality based off of harm. I brought up the example of pornography because it's tremendously subjective and ambiguous and people disagree over what is harm or not within pornography. So it was not weird that I brought up pornography. This is very strong in this argument.

And many of the women, STDs, high rates of suicide. But then on the one psychotherapeutic side, many relationships, many people would say, no, it's actually not only not harmful, but it's actually improving our marriage.

And what they'll do is they'll either watch pornography together or they'll go in separate rooms and watch and they'll say that'll improve our marriage. And then many will say, no, it's improving my life and I'm fleeing from harm and I'm actually improving my life by watching pornography because it's, you know, you get to masturbate. It's stress relief. It's a form of entertainment. And so all I'm that's the reason why I brought that example.

Is because there's endless amounts of examples where people disagree over what exactly harm is. And so to just try and set up a whole moral ethical system based off of this ambiguous subjective title, word, harm, is just kind of a crock to me. Maybe that could be one of many. Could be one of many. There's nothing. Come on now. My second point here, I'm going to ask you. You keep going back to the morality coming from the natural. How in the world do you get

morality from matter. How do you get meaning from matter? How do you get love from matter? You keep saying it comes from the natural. So when I hear you say that, you're saying from matter, right?

How do you get the immaterial from the material then? Well, we are material beings. You agree with me. We are biological animals, right? Yes. Yeah, and there's nothing in your body or mind that does not exist out in the natural world. There's nothing materially special about us, right? But it's the functioning that matters. You're chewing some gum right now and your mouth is functioning in a certain way. Yeah. We call that chewing. Yeah.

Your heart beats, we call that circulation. The stomach, we call that digestion, right? The lungs, we call that respiration. The brain is also a functioning organ. We call that thought or mind or some people even call it consciousness. And within that amazing functioning of this brain and other animal brains as well, that means not just humans,

We have developed strategies to try to survive and increase our well-being and get through the world with at least amount of harm possible. Our whole strategy is about we build houses to protect ourselves from the environment. Sorry, you lost me. Go back again. Go back to how did you get that leap from our physical material nature to all of a sudden an immaterial, which is harm?

What's the jump? Harm is not immaterial. Well, the idea of harm is. Well, harm is real. I mean, you have to agree. You're a strict materialist then. Okay, so you're saying then you're still getting harm. You're getting morality though. You're still saying from matter. But at least – How do you – just make the connection for me. How do you get from one to the other? I don't know what you're saying. You are an animal and you experience harm, right? Yeah.

You know that. You experience it. Because of that, we have evolved mechanisms to try to minimize that. We have instincts. And since we have a highly functioning brain, we have moral principles that are functions. They're not things.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Moral principles, but you're just a brain. Yes, a brain that's functioning. You don't have moral principles if you're just a physical brain. That's what a moral principle is, Stuart. No. A functioning brain. No, you're just a three-pound piece of flesh up there. That's all you are. You can't start saying I'm immaterial moral principles. That's what a moral principle is.

That's a total contradiction. I think you have, I'm sorry, you have a bit of a simplistic idea with the brain. Okay, here, let me try and make it a little bit more. No, let me get in here. Hold on a second. Let me make it a little smarter for you then. Let's say you got an eye doctor. Hold on a second. I do want to hear that from Mr. Barker. I promise we'll come right back to you soon. Just to be sure. Oh, you made an ad hominem attack. No, I didn't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But you, I admit there's a lot of things I have to learn. I admit it. I'm humble about that. There's a lot of, it's also true of you.

Yes, that is for sure. And God says he actually wants you to ask questions now. So right now, Stuart, you are looking at me with your eyes and you see something, right? And that image is being produced somewhere back in the cerebellum or back in the back part of the eye.

visual cortex of your brain, your brain is functioning in such a way that it's taking those photons and the impressions and receiving them and organizing them. And when the brain dies, that doesn't happen. When you're dead, that doesn't happen. But the fact that your brain is functioning now, you now have an image in your mind. How do you explain that image to

in a natural world. Well, we just did. Our brains create those images. Our brains create thoughts. Our functioning brains create principles and laws and systems of law and of justice. We create. They're not things. You can't say that how did the natural world create something supernatural. It's not supernatural any more than circulation is supernatural or digestion. When the body dies, does anybody ask...

Where did the digestion go? That's a stupid question. And when our brain is functioning, there are ideas, thoughts, songs, images, there's all sorts of things happening that are not actually things. They are the result of a functioning organism that happens in all biological organs. So when we talk about harm, which is real,

We can then think about that harm and develop strategies within this creative brain to minimize that harm. And we all do that, and we all know that's true, regardless of whether there's a transcendent world or not. No, that's way off. I think you need to get a more complex – I've heard many more complex – update it. You need to evolve that.

In that understanding, I love that you're a consistent, strict materialist. That's very impressive. I meet very few of you these days. But for me, okay, fine, we'll take a different example then. Let's hit consciousness. Okay, you got, say, an eye doctor, since you brought up the eye. You have an eye doctor who was born blind. And for all of her life, she's been blind, but she's an eye doctor. And so she's able to explain the intricacies of the eye.

But then all of a sudden one day, say she's supernaturally healed or just somehow is just all of a sudden has the abilities to see. And then she starts talking about blindness. Would you say it'd be slightly different than her description of what blindness was before receiving sight? I would say yes. I would say her personal experience, which would be connected to something like say consciousness, is radically different than

And so for a strict materialist like yourself to be able to explain away something like the personal experience and consciousness, I've never heard a good response to it from a strict materialist perspective. Some atheists try and use other different forms of theories that they can get out from underneath it, kind of.

But how do you explain that? How do you explain that from a strict materialist perspective? There's a lot of good books out on that topic. And I don't want to hear about the books. I want to hear about Dan Barker's understanding of personal experience and consciousness. I mean, Tom Nagel is the top philosopher, many would say right now in the U.S. out of NYU, strong agnostic. But he said from a naturalistic, materialistic perspective, consciousness, you can't even come close to touching as an atheist. Yeah, you can. You would say Tom's wrong.

Yeah, I think so. I think many philosophers are wrong. Daniel Dennett even thinks many of those philosophers are wrong.

But when the brain gets big enough, like ours is, to where you're not only...

You're not only aware of things, but you are feedback looping and you're aware that you are aware. You are thinking that you are thinking. You're raising it up to another level. And that creates in our minds what we could call illusions, like depth perception is an illusion. Depth perception is not a real thing. It's two eyes. In fact, I just read a great book by Susan Barry, who was born without depth perception, and she poo-pooed it.

She heard people talk about it, but she thought, well, what is that? Until her eyes were corrected, Oliver Sacks, who was a good friend of ours, helped her with that. And when she did get back her stereo vision, she was amazed at the beauty. The thing that most of us take for granted, she realized she was missing something until she was able to have that cognitive experience. So you, I mean, not that everything is explicable. I like Daniel Dennett's metaphor, right?

The brain is doing hundreds of things at once right now. And you know it is, and you're focusing on some of that. But your brain is also doing a lot of other things, listening, watching, observing, feeling, and whatever. And there's all these what you could call modules or whatever you want to call them. They're all happening at once. And Daniel Dennett said consciousness is really the center of narrative gravity. It's the part that's

And center of gravity is a good analogy because a center of gravity in the real world actually doesn't exist. There's no such thing as a center of gravity. What's the center of gravity of a donut? It's not a thing, it's a concept. Likewise, Dennett makes a good analogy that our brains are also having so many things going on at once, there is a kind of

focused center of gravity that we then call that word consciousness because we are aware that we are aware. It doesn't need anything spooky or supernatural. It doesn't need anything non-material to function. And there are others. David Chalmers wrote his book about the, was it the Astonishing Hypothesis?

So even though we may not have all the answers, you cannot say there is not a natural explanation, or at least potentially a natural explanation for consciousness. You can't say that. All right, that's just silly.

Absolutely. So I, okay, don't get me wrong, though. I do think consciousness is coming from the physical. You're exactly right. But as soon as you jump from the physical to something immaterial, whether that's matter to morality, or your physical fleshly brain to something like consciousness, you have no words like I started to hear you sound like you were making up words.

Because you can't get around it from a strict materialistic perspective. That's why I think you're going to need to drop the early 2000s or 90s. Because even Sam Harris today, as ridiculous as he sounds, he'll say something like free will. Richard Dawkins says it too. Richard Dawkins says free will is an illusion.

He says it's something that happened within evolution, but it's a misfiring to help us in some sense. But you can't, as a strict materialist, say that free will exists. Thank you, Richard. I think he's being consistent. I don't think Dan Barker is being consistent at all right now, but I think Richard's being consistent. And he says, I get very uncomfortable when we talk about free will because I know it exists, but it's not supposed to exist. I like that. Thank you, Richard. And it's an illusion.

So he gets it. I don't know why you don't get it. I disagree with Richard on a lot of things, but that makes a lot of sense. And he's the top atheist supposedly in the world. So then you go to Sam Harris and he says, yeah, exactly. Free will, hard to explain from a materialist perspective. And he goes to the extent, I love this, where there is no real free will for a materialist because it's an immaterial thing.

And he says, so if there's no real free will, he used the Cheshire example. And so up the street here from New Canaan, two guys got out of prison. If you remember the Cheshire slayings, they followed a woman home from the bank, lit her on fire after raping her two daughters as well, lit the house on fire. Anyway, Sam Harris comes along and he says, well, you know, free will is kind of an illusion.

And we're materialists here. And so this guy, he was determined, both of them were, by their neurochemicals and their upbringing and what happened to them in prison. So how culpable should we really hold them? So I'm, I mean, look, if Dan has way better, way better points than Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, then I'm, I'm all ears and maybe I'll become an atheist tonight.

But we can move on because there's one thing that, again, this shows your broken wing, Dan, unless you still have more on that topic. I do. I have a lot more on that topic. Well, we better move on then because I don't want to get pinned into a corner here by Dan Barker because there's one issue that we have to get to tonight that is the very central message of the whole Christian worldview. And that is your idea on this whole punishment and reward and the threatening of violence and hell.

Like we can keep going with consciousness, but you completely misrepresented everything about Christianity. I mean, I don't think so. And I think as a pastor of three churches, that's embarrassing. That's absolutely embarrassing for you to not even include an inch of grace based off of what happened on the cross scares me.

The greatest thinkers in the world who are atheists, even they notice something called, oh, lowercase grace, by the way, and forgiveness and forgiving your enemy at the cross. So I know you've got this broken wing and this emotional bias, and that's okay. We all do. So I've written an entire book about free will. It's called Free Will Explained. I've read, I think, just about everything there is to read about it, and I quote them, I cite them.

And I like Sam Harris's book. Did you actually read his book or did you just listen to it? Lectures. I mean, I read a little bit of it and listen to lectures. I was mainly citing Dawkins word for word. Yeah. And, and I've also heard Dawkins say different things about a free will as well. But you got to listen recently then he said that to Peterson and he said it to Alex O'Connor just a couple of weeks ago. And so I agree that free will is an illusion, but an illusion is not nothing free.

An illusion is something, I just referred to the illusion of depth perception, which you have right now. It's an illusion that your brain is creating. The depth perception has two different signals from two different eyes that combine to make this three-dimensional stereo vision, right? In your brain, that's an illusion, and we have to admit that it's not a real thing, but it's a useful illusion, right?

An illusion is not nothing. Even though it's an illusion, it doesn't mean it's not a real thing that's happening in our brains. So illusions like death perception and, I think, free will can help us navigate the landscape. And in the case of death perception, it's the physical landscape. In the case of moral landscape, it's free will.

So, those people who committed those horrible crimes, it may be true that they were determined ever since the Big Bang to have committed those crimes. That does not make them less culpable because we are judging an agent as the nexus, as the actual committer of that crime.

And to protect ourselves in society, we look at that perhaps damaged individual who committed the crime. We have to protect ourselves from that. So we have laws. We have systems of justice. We have juries. And there's a difference between a conviction and a sentencing. It might be that you discovered, oh, no, that criminal who's guilty did have a brain tumor. Oh, well, doesn't that change your...

impression of the sentencing of them. So we do have a basis for moral accountability and moral judgment and for the illusion of free will and acting as if each of us has it in a real sense when we don't actually have it, although we have it in our brains as an illusion. So it makes perfect sense, and I encourage you to read... My book summarizes, and there's differences of opinion. I disagree with Sam Harris on a couple of little things. Sam Harris thinks that

And I agree with him that there's no free will and that it's an illusion. But he thinks the illusion of free will is pernicious. It's damning. We need to get rid of it, he and Jerry Coyne and others.

I think, I agree with him on everything, but I think the illusion of free will can be beautiful. It can be useful. It can help us in our moral guidance. So maybe you've read a lot about this, and I don't want to add homonym you, because you're a good guy. But I think there is more you could learn by reading more of the literature, Stuart.

Excellent. I just hear updates all the time. You atheists disagree on all this, just like churches disagree on everything. And we're happy to. I would love to hear latest updates. And it's, it's one that's, that's tremendously frustrating because I just hear you guys start to use these made up words. Like Sam Harris, he's made, he just makes his own dictionary pretty much to try and get around these terms. Just like a lot of books are coming out. Like John David's at the Hunter, uh, Christian Smith. I was just talking to the associate great sociologist over there at Notre Dame. Like,

They're coming out with books calling atheists out for redefining terms to try and get morality from the natural and scientific. And I love it. I absolutely love it. And people are like, oh, that's very true. Like Kidner and everybody else. So I would just encourage you to read. I'll read your stuff. You read their stuff. And maybe we'll have another conversation. Well, I do. You brought up something that's all in the same category that I'll just start taking off because I took notes.

You brought up this idea of, you know, blessings and curses. Wow. What about all those related to something like a marriage vow? And I do weddings summertime on every ring. First Corinthians chapter 13 is on those rings. What Paul says, whatever is true, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.

Love is pure. Love is patient. Love is kind. Does not envy. Does not boast. Is not rude. Is not self-pleasing. Is not easily angered. Keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil. I mean, I could go on and on. All these qualities are straight from what Christ taught and how he lived and how he said, love your enemy. And that shattered every major ancient civilization that was there at the time. The Romans were all about the evolutionary process. Strong, eat the weak. Jesus came and he said, no, it's not cool to be the strong. It's cool to be the weak.

The weak now is the powerful and the powerful are the weak. And that was completely ridiculous to every single person. Like Josephus even wrote about it. He said, all these, all these Christians are being pitied. And then certain Roman empires, you know, Tacitus wrote about it as well. All these plagues that hit within the first 300 years, AD of the Roman empire. And you got Christians coming in,

Not only leaving the cities to bring Romans, bring Samaritans outside of the city, giving up their own lives because of these plagues to save them. You got to see this, all these others saying these Christians are helping more of our people than we are. What's going on? And so at the very center, and I hope if there's one thing you walk away with in this conversation debate tonight, Dan, is

A reinterpretation of what the central message of Scripture is. Certainly you'll have tough judgment passages in the Old Testament. Couldn't agree with you. Couldn't agree with you more. But your interpretation of hell, I mean, a lot of it sounds Dante's Inferno-esque. It sounds Dan Brown-esque. I mean, just read the Scripture for itself. You've been to seminary, it sounds like. Read Luke chapter 16.

I mean, the rich man Lazarus, he wanted to be in hell. He never said, get me out of here. He lived for his wealth. And so taken to an eternal perspective, you know, probably psychologically and physically, you live for wealth, you're going to have a painful existence, but people can't stop living for it.

I'm living in New Canaan, Connecticut. I see it clearest here. People want to live for wealth, even if it's destroying their marriages, destroying their kids, destroying their own physical health. That's what the rich man in Lazarus is exactly beautifully communicating when it comes to hell. So the God of the universe hanging on a cross, and you tried to say Galatians 3.28, again, this judgment piece or the exclusive piece on it's only the baptized.

Fine. I think that's a wrong interpretation, but let's stay if you're right on that one. Okay, explain then the thief on the cross. Did Jesus say, hop down from this cross and you better become one of the baptized? No, he said, today you'll be with me in paradise. He said nothing about baptism. And that's a thief, my friend. That is a thief who was definitely not a Christ follower either.

So you need to rescind a lot of those claims, but you just got to fall on like, look, agape is the number one word used towards the Christian faith. The Christian faith was known two categories to be the suffering faith and

and the faith of love, a personal God. And so Larry Hurtado from Marquette, for example, when he talked about all the gods in the early Roman Empire, you were to walk into a home and you were to worship every God. And the person whose home you walked into, they would also worship, say you brought Christ in, or Krishna, whoever it might be. But Christians became known as the only ones to have a God who wanted a personal, personal, loving relationship with Dan Barker.

Don't take my word for it. Don't take the Bible for it. Look historically into it yourself. And then you start to understand, okay, wow, I still hate this Bible and I still don't like some of the Old Testament teachings, but okay, yeah, historically, if the Romans truly believed that and understood it and they thought it was grotesque, Josephus definitely thought it was grotesque, well, at least let me be consistent to the faith as a truth seeker, an honest truth seeker and say, okay,

They were after love. Jesus was after love. And that was known. But I don't need that. You don't need it. I don't care about it. I don't admire it. Because you're not a truth seeker. I don't admire Jesus. That's fine. It's because you've got a broken wing. You agree with me that Jesus talked about a lake of fire where nonbelievers will be punished, right? You agree with that? Yes or no? No.

It's not a yes or no question. Did Jesus say that there is a lake of fire where nonbelievers will be punished? You think he's talking about Lake Placid? Whatever it means. It's in the Bible. We don't know exactly what he meant by that. Is it more metaphorical or literal? We don't know if that's going to be the Lake of Galilee. Well, is it a good thing?

Is the lake of fire a good thing? The rich man, it was not enjoyable. And he told, he said, please don't let my relatives come here, but I'm staying here. So it's an enjoyable existence in one sense. And if you know psychology, you will know something called learned helplessness that people do want to remain in hell.

It's easier for them in many ways. They can't even serve themselves. You heard what Mark Twain said. Heaven for climate, hell for society. All the smart people. You know what also Mark Twain said? Mark Twain said, it's not the things that I don't like about the Bible that bug me.

Wait, no, what did he say? Surely you know this quote. I'll quote it to you. It's not the things I don't understand about the Bible. It's the things I do understand. Thank you. That's a Dan Barker life verse right there, and you know it. That's a Dan Barker life verse, and I'm so glad that you have it memorized and not me, because you need to take that one home.

You know you need to take that one home. Yeah, but don't you see the point? I do understand it. I do see the point, yes. I do understand it, Stuart. Mark Twain had dreams. Dan Barker, Mark Twain is very similar to you. Very similar wit as well. Well, I think that's a compliment. I am complimenting you right now. I go to Mark Twain's house here in Hartford almost every year. I am complimenting you right now. Do you know that Mark Twain had nightmares of this big Bible laying on his chest many

Many nights suffocating him because he looked at the Bible as primarily one of judgment, of curses, of fear of hell. And he didn't understand who Jesus Christ was. And he didn't listen even to what Christ taught. Well, you know, also. And so that's exactly where Dan Barker's at. He thinks the Bible is just this book telling you you're all going to hell if you're gays.

and if you're not walking in perfect line in every way, and if you don't have the same level of ethics and understanding of the Pharisees, then you're going to burn forever, Dan. If I truly thought that that's what the Bible and that's what Christ taught, I would be in the same boat as you. But I am more honest than you in my exegesis and my interpretation and giving room for what exactly Jesus is saying. Well, I don't think so. I don't think you're as honest. I don't think your interpretation is correct. I think you are loyal.

I think you are interpreting it like a loyal follower and looking for the good in it and not seeing the actual truth that's there. That's my learned opinion about many of your supposed – Now how? That's just a bald assertion. Now how?

You tried to whitewash Jesus' teachings about slavery. You tried to whitewash... He didn't speak. Dan, do a basic Google search. Basic Google search. Just to be sure that Dan gets a chance to speak as well is that I appreciate your passion, Stuart. Sweet mercy, though. I can't have Dan on...

I can't do the Jesus and slavery thing right now. Nobody says that. Dan, please just do a simple Google search on did Jesus promote slavery? And the secular liberals will say no on Google and AI. Just do one right now. I want to give Dan the last 30 seconds of this open dialogue, and then we're going to jump into the Q&A.

So it wasn't Psalm 73, it was Psalm 137. And it wasn't the Canaanites they were complaining about, it was the Babylonians they were complaining about. It's the last verse of Psalm 137 that said, happy.

And the word is happy there. Yes. And many translate it as blessed. Happy shall they be who take the little ones and dash them against the stones. They didn't say it was regrettable collateral war damage. They said you, the reader, in a book supposedly inspired by God, should be happy to take little babies and dash them against the stones.

You should be happy to do that according to your Bible. And that's a correct interpretation, by the way. You are you. Oh, I've done a whole analysis of this and shake your head as much as you want. I'm going to give you a response when you're ready. Well, we're out of time here. Yeah, exactly. We are in time. We're going to jump into the Q&A. Folks want to say thank you very much for your questions. We're going to jump into these.

Do want to let you know our guests are linked in the description box, and that includes at the podcast. So all of our debates end up on the Modern Day Debate podcast, available at fine podcast apps everywhere, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, you name it. And you can find our guest links in the description box for the podcast as well. In addition...

housekeeping stuff. We are still working on our GoFundMe project in which you're raising funds for our camera lenses that we'll be using for our in-person debates at debate con and other projects such as outnumbered, which starts this summer. This first question coming in from folks, we've got a good amount of questions. So I would say we can't guarantee if you put in a question after this moment that we're going to get to it because we've got a good list. Batman Inc says, I would like to encourage study on St.

Thomas Aquinas' multi-volume Summa Theologica to see Christianity's intellectual defensibility, also Happy Month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

It's more of a plug, but Fight Me XD says, Stuart, your father, Cliff's abuse... I can't see. All right. Read it. Read it, James. Oh, Dan. Read it. Cliff's abuse toward you made you cling to magic and fairy tales. Now, as an adult, you still cling to fantasies like Santa, hindering your ability to think clearly and grow mentally. Jesus.

Hey, at least I know the ocean I'm swimming in, my friend. You can't even get to the point of saying the Judeo-Christian values have shaped our country and that you're still living by them. That's what Nietzsche said. Friedrich Nietzsche said that, not Stuart Kinectly, Dan's old friend. But he's not listening to Nietzsche either. Hey, James, before we go on, can we put a time limit on the answers so we can move along? Yes. Maybe 60 seconds.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Even Lord says, "Happy Jurassic June. Happy Dino Month. Hello James. Thank you for your kind words. Hollywood D says, "Keep up the good work. Thanks for your kind words. Check out our guest links in the description. They are the lifeblood of this channel." Even Lord says, "Mr. Barker, what is wrong with slavery? How can you justify your opinion if you do not have objective morality? What makes your opinion valuable to others?" Slavery causes harm.

You got it. And this one coming in from Deputy Frank Garrett says, love to receive great bread. Okay. Bakery guy, even lower. It says, Mr. Canackley, do Jews have magic? Let's see. Like, do they have some sort of magicness about them as an ethnic group? I think they mean like God's chosen people in the Old Testament. Is there asking, like, is there, are they like spiritual?

Good question. Just like Noah, God did not choose Noah because of something great that he did. God chose Noah just by God's grace. And that's the same with the Jews. There was nothing in and of themselves that the Jews were built with or did better. It was just by God's grace that he used them to reach all nations. That's why you have something like, say, Jesus highlighting the Good Samaritan even more so than the Jew.

I mean, Jesus was a Jew himself. So you would be like, obviously, Jesus would highlight the Jew, right? But no, he's saying everybody's on equal playing ground. And how interesting. We are so high on egalitarianism in our nation today. I think Dan probably is as well. I wonder where we got that.

Maybe it was from the Greeks, you know, Plato. Maybe it was from them who were pro-slavery. No, it couldn't have been them. I wonder who it came from. Oh, the humanists. Yeah, what's the history of humanism? Oh, the history of humanism is a bunch of just white dudes always sitting around a nice conference table, inviting one, like, black nation there when it's all just, you know, it's a what? Over... I'm going to stop. This one coming in from Jordan...

Lofgren says, Stuart, please reach out to and debate Jay Dyer. Obviously, let's see, this is atheism. They say debate Jay, please. I don't understand. Zuver says, Stuart, why would an all-knowing, all-loving God create a universe in which most people end up in hell knowing all that beforehand? By the way, freedom of will or not makes no difference.

Okay, how in the world do you know that the majority of people in the world are going to hell? I mean, Hebrews chapter 11, there's endless amounts of people who didn't know Jesus were going to be in heaven. You know, the patriarchs are some of them. And so what are you trying to take the book of Revelation 144,000 and say it's gonna be 144,000 people in heaven? No, obviously, there's metaphor in apocalyptic literature.

So that's my first point. Second point is God still thought it was worth it to share his love. His love existed throughout eternity. Father, son, Holy Spirit loving each other throughout time. I think Dan and Stuart, our two biggest drives are to be loved and to love others. I don't think you get that from atheistic evolution. I don't think that really stacks up. Hey, we are raised red in tooth and claw. Therefore, let us love one another. That's what the materialist atheist says.

And so God knows that we will suffer, but in no way is he forcing us into that suffering. Just because he has foreknowledge doesn't mean he's willing it. You got it, Dan. This one coming in from, do appreciate it. Even though it says, Sir Horthy saved the most lives as a Hungarian. I don't remember that coming up in the debate. Bubblegum Gun said, Mr. Barker, let's see. They're saying, they say,

Is the procedures done on LGBT children causing moral harm? Ooh, I like that one. Is this harm in your worldview? Well, it may or may not be, and I think it's up to the choice of the person. Sometimes in order to minimize harm, you actually have to create harm.

And so that's why I don't use the word eliminate harm, I use the word minimize harm. For example, I think we would all agree that it is harmful to chop off somebody's leg. But you might have to do that to save a life. You might have to do an amputation. Sometimes some limited temporary harm is necessary for a greater good. And so we have to weigh each of those situations.

And so I don't know. I'm not a doctor. I don't know what would happen in any of these cases. So I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that. I do know that I do think that those few people, very tiny amount of humans who choose to do that must have some good reason. And if they're going in through medical care, I'm assuming there's some good safeguards and guardrails in place to minimize the overall harm, even though there might be some temporary harm that's caused. You got it?

This one coming in from Arcade Outposts says, the culture, quote-unquote, ignores crime statistics regarding... Let's see. That has nothing to do with the debate. Apollo says, all abolitionists were Christians. David Hume was a racist. Also, Dan misrepresented the purpose of Old Testament descriptions of imperfect leaders. Well, um...

Two things to that. There were a number of non-Christian abolitionists. A big one that comes to mind is Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine was one of our great forgotten founders in the United States. And he was in favor of women's rights. He was way ahead of his time. He was an early abolitionist. He opposed slavery.

you know, Jefferson and those who owned slaves. He thought it was an outrage. He was not a Christian. He was a deist. In fact, he wrote a very popular book in the late 19th century called The Age of Reason, in which he really heavily criticized the Bible. And it makes for good reading, 19th century reading, if you know what I mean, because we've learned more since then. But Thomas Paine, you

believed with all his heart, without believing in the Bible, without loving Jesus, without knowing any of that, he believed, contrary to many of his Christian friends who did believe slavery was okay, he believed that it was a moral outrage. And the Hungarian thing was that atheist in Auschwitz that I was talking about. I wish I could remember the name of the book.

A smart guy who actually escaped. You weren't supposed to escape Auschwitz, but he and a buddy found a way to escape and notified the Hungarians about what was happening there and saved a lot of lives because of that. And I would judge him morally as a good person because he was acting in a way to minimize real harm in the real world. But it was up to him. But it was up to him. He ought not to have done that. It was just up to him.

Because you used those words a second ago. Oh, it's up to you at the LGBTQ example. Okay. Up to you. So you not ought to have saved those Jews' lives. So don't use the word ought or should or good in any type of objective sense. It was up to him. He decided. I want to give Dan a chance to respond before we go to the next question. Yeah, well, all morality is like that. Some people do choose to be moral and some don't. Some people are psychopaths and some are not.

And there is no such thing as an ought. There is no moral ought. An ought is only the second half of a conditional sentence. If we wish to live in a world with less harm, then we ought to act in ways to minimize it. The ought is not some transcendent thing coming down from above. It's practical. It's sensible. It's natural. It's rational.

This one coming in from Apollos, Christian Apologetics, says, No serious philosopher, including atheist philosophers, think of, quote, lack of belief as not being belief. They say burden of proof assumes dialectical egalitarianism, but actual philosophers say there are valid arguments from ignorance. There are some atheists who are positive atheists. In fact, there's a society called the

I think it's called the Disproved Society of Atheists, who can actually claim they have disproved the existence of God. And in their case,

you might call them hard capital A atheists. In their case, they are asserting a burden of proof. They think they can actually prove God does not exist. And they have some amazing arguments. Most atheists, though, are lowercase a, not positive, but just intrinsic atheists. In fact, a lot of them don't even use the word atheist. They just don't believe in a God. In fact, the composer Verdi was a lifelong anti-clerical atheist,

And his wife was interviewed by the press once saying, my husband is such a good man. He's so generous. And he doesn't even believe in God. But I don't think he's an atheist. She was confused. And I think a lot of philosophers are confused. There are philosophers. What's his name who just died last year? It was Gordon Stein. And there are many, many philosophers.

atheistic, agnostic writers and histories who do define atheism as the absence of belief.

And I will defend my absence of belief. I will assume a defensive strategy by pointing out there's no coherent definition of a God. There's no good evidence for a God. There is no good argument for a God. And I've talked about all of them. There is none. I mean, there are arguments, but there are no good ones. There is no agreement among believers in this God about his moral principles or his nature whatsoever.

There is no good answer to the problem of evil, and there's no need for God. Just to keep to that 60-second request you had. Right. You've got to jump to the next question. This one coming in from The Sacrament Show says, How do you make a moral argument as an atheist—

Where do your morals come from? I think you've covered this, but let's humor. Yeah, we did. Morals don't come from anywhere. They don't need a source. Morality is a word that we use to describe a concept of trying to minimize harm in the real world. That's what we mean by moral. That's what we all mean by moral. We know somebody's bad. They're a criminal because why? They have caused harm. Can

It can be direct harm or indirect harm. So our morality comes from something real, not imaginary. It comes from the real world. What causes harm and what can we do to try to minimize it? I mean, that's a very positive, practical way of thinking about the world. You got it. This one coming in from Apollos. It says, Dan strawmans and forgets the lawgiver is omniscient. I'm trying to think what you had said that...

suggest that the lawgiver is not omniscient. We never talked about omniscience here. JSS Tiger says, Jesus was probably a casual street magician who realized one day he could use it to pretend to be a prophet, Stuart. Just give me the evidence and I'll believe you. I don't believe that's true. I mean, that would be one tiny...

probability among dozens of other possible explanations for Jesus. But I, you know, there were some magicians running around. They were called Thaumaturges and they were pretending to heal people and they were pretending, you know, and a lot of them had followers. So it's possible. I doubt it. It's possible that Jesus was one of those guys. Fine, Dan. That was my question. So I'm going to finish this one.

It was it's interesting how I was talking to this recent historian, new buddy of mine. Now, he he did his work at Yale and Harvard, and he's at Fairfield now and he's going around. Peter J. Williams is supporting a lot of his work and he's doing a great job going around different Ivies right now. And he's coming out with a Oxford Press book on Josephus. And it's fascinating how.

You know how a lot of Christians have been the ones pegged for having changed, tinkered with Josephus' work. But a lot of Josephus' style about what he's talking about Jesus actually fits. He's showing the historical genre and nature and being there at Pilate's, at the actual trial as well. And how him talking about the trial actually when he talks about Jesus is

He had documented other Christian messianic movements. There were over 100 messianic movements that historically are verifiable in Jesus's day. And basically, Josephus speaks about Jesus in the only way where he doesn't laugh it off. Like he says his disciples truly believe this happened. Obviously, Josephus never said, I believe it happened.

But it's fascinating how this new discovery on historical Josephus and his writings are showing actually that his disciples truly believe this. And you've got to take this messianic figure seriously, not just a magician. Time. This one from Issa Kabir says, Dan, most of the Ivy League schools are of Christian foundation. If Christianity is indefensible, how is it a guiding force of the intellectual elite through history?

Well, we know Harvard, for example, was started as a seminary to train young preachers. So that's true. It started off in a Christian tradition, but very quickly outgrew that. And now is the College of Liberal Arts. It's not a it's not a Christian university anymore. And of course, again,

A predominant culture in an area is going to establish its institutions according to its own predominant culture. Look at India, though. Look at other countries where the religions are different. You will find schools and hospitals and hospitals.

People say, "Have atheists ever built any hospitals?" Of course they have, and we have good examples. In fact, most of our hospital systems connected with universities in the U.S. could be said to have been created largely by non-believers because it was not a religious mission. So I think we can be charitable and admit that there are an awful lot of good Christians in the world. I mean, atheists don't say Christians are all bad people and lack morals.

And many of them do good things, and some of them attribute their good deeds to their faith. But name a good deed that a Christian does that a non-Christian cannot do and has not done through history. So let's give credit where credit is due, but let's also give credit to the doubters, the skeptics, the freethinkers, the agnostics, the others who have been actively engaged in making this a better world.

And the average American still says outright, if they were walking down a dark alley, it would matter to them, they were by themselves, if a group of people were coming in the other direction, and they found out that those people just walked out of a Bible study. You got it. This one from Spectator says, religion is the codification of thousands of years of complex moral principles and lessons evolved over thousands of years of lived human experience.

Far more complex than any denialist. I am an atheist. I don't know what the question in that was. Well, let me just take a stab. It seems like he's asking, has religion also evolved? Just like other moral systems and judicial systems and society. If we look at religion from outside as a very real human phenomenon...

How did it get here? And I think the questioner is asking, did it also go through a process of evidence? Just like law, the Magna Carta was really a...

really simple but not very useful system of law but it evolved and then further developments and then English common law and then we have we keep developing and law evolves law is not handed down from on high and I think this questioner might be asking can't we say the same thing about religion it evolved from simple ideas and is built up in different cultures around the world you got it and Red Fox says Mr. Barker why is harm bad though

Harm is bad because it compromises the ability of our organism to function as it should or as we want it to. So if my arm is cut off, I am less able to do what I would do. If I'm killed, of course, I'm less able. If I'm sick, I am less able to function. Every single organism in the world has evolved adaptations and strategies and instincts to avoid harm.

The birds that come to the bird feeder outside our building at work, when they see an unfamiliar shape, they all fly away. They don't know if it's dangerous or not. They don't know that it's me who wants to look at them. They evolve that natural instinct because over time that helped that species to evolve. So we all have those instincts. We all have them. Plus we have an additional rational ability to weigh the consequences of our actions and maybe not act instinctively in some cases. So...

So harm, I mean, you know what harm is. We all know what harm is. We don't like it. We don't want it. We try to avoid it. Unless you're some kind of a sadomasochistic, you know, mentally compromised person, most of us try to live our lives in such a way that we avoid as much harm as possible. That's just natural. That's real. You got it. Batman Inc. says, Mr. Barker in Psalm 137, verse 8 says,

It says, quote, O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us. And then it says also, abortion causes harm. Is abortion wrong by that logic? Well, if you keep reading into verse 9, it then says, blessed...

In other words, the Israelites in captivity were really pissed off that they couldn't go back to their temple to worship, as if they couldn't worship anywhere in the world. They had to be in their temple to worship. And the Babylonians treated them badly, and they were mad. And that psalmist was justifiably angry. I think so. There's a lot of anger in that verse. But what that psalmist says wasn't turn the other cheek and be kind and gentle. The psalmist said,

You know, just like verse 8, the psalmist said then, whoever wrote that, it wasn't David, but whoever wrote it, blessed are those who take the Babylonian babies and dash them against the rock. Those babies are innocent. Right?

And yet the psalmist, supposedly the word of God that Christians revere, said, blessed or happy, you can translate it either way, happy shall be the one who takes those babies and picks them up and dashes them against the rock. Could you do that? Stuart couldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. But the Bible said you should be happy to do that. You got it? Did God say that?

Yes, if it's the word of God. God never said that. Hold on one sec. I don't want to go off top. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too much because they also have that second part of their question about they say abortion causes harm. Is abortion wrong by that logic? It was David, by the way. You countered me and saying it wasn't David. It was David, by the way. Just keeping you honest.

David wrote during the time of the Babylonian captivity? People thought it was Jeremiah, but then switched it to David. And David was alive during the time of the Babylonian captivity? I just read that right now from the commentary. Really? Yeah.

Boy, how long did he live then? This verse, according to the Septuagint, it's for David. Oh, so for David by Jeremiah in the captivity. Yeah. By Jeremiah, you're right. Yeah, but that was the Septuagint Greek translation, and they were guessing when they translated it. For David, not by David, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And Jeremiah was not in Babylon either. Jeremiah was not in captive, but who knows if Jeremiah wrote it or not. You just softened it so hard though. Like they were swept into captivity. You were like, they were just annoyed with the Babylonians. Like, come on, Dan. Yeah. But still stronger than that. Even then it's the worst.

Assume the worst. Should you be happy to dash babies? No commentator, serious commentator that I know has said that that's actually God saying, go grab a baby and bash. Like that's just a really bad example. Use a slavery example. No good commentator I've heard has said that. Well, most of the defenses I've heard about it are that this was

the personal expression of the psalmist and not God's Word. But in that case, every single word in the Bible was written by a human being with some kind of an agenda, right? We should discount it all then as not the Word of God. I want to be sure we get to this part of the question. They say also abortion causes harm. Is abortion wrong by that logic? So overall, most of the time, I believe abortion does not cause harm. If you're looking at the mother's life and the mother's future,

I've worked for a long time with the Women's Medical Fund, which raises money to help poor women pay for abortions. And I had to take the phone call in Spanish one time. And this young woman was 19 years old. She had three children. Her husband was in jail. She was living in her mother's apartment. And her mother was just about to be evicted.

And she said, I can't be pregnant. I just can't. I love my kids. I'm struggling to provide for them. So we raised money to help her get that abortion, which was a positive blessing in her life. That fetus was not a human being. It was not a person. And it was that pregnancy that she did not want and did not ask for was causing harm in her life. So on balance, sure, I mean,

You know, at some point there might be some pain, you know, when an operation happens. But in the big picture, you are a moral person if you are acting with the intention of minimizing overall harm. So in most cases, of course, I think abortion is, if I can use the word that Ann Gaylor used, it's a blessing in most women's lives who ask for it.

This one coming in from JSS Tiger says, God told Adam and Eve to stay away from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He wanted his brainwashed creation to not look for truth. Do it. Hmm.

I didn't hear it because I just heard abortion and blessing used in the same sentence. You're looking at Twitter or something. They say God told Adam and Eve to stay away from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He wanted his brainwashed creation to not look for truth. No, no. God gave Adam and Eve all they wanted. The only reason why there was that one tree was to show their relationship with God, what it would be like.

And what they said was, God does not care about me ultimately. He does not take my ultimate best into concern. So I'm going to eat of this tree. And that's what the average person today does with God, whether it's Dan or myself. It's God doesn't have my best for me. And so I'm going to either doubt him or I'm going to flee from him. And just like a criminal runs from the cops, Dan is running from God. And just like a

A man who's knocking on the door of a brothel is looking for a prostitute. Dan's looking for God. And we all are, and we're all dirty, rotten sinners, Dan. But I agree with Sigmund Freud, who was definitely not a Christian, but I agree with him when he talked about the id, the ego, and the superego. And he'd say Dan Barker and Stuart Kinectly both have an id, an ego, and a superego. We are dirty, rotten sinners, while at the same time created in God's image and loved more than we could ever imagine.

This one coming in from, do appreciate it, Red Fox. And we've only got two more questions left. So folks, please don't ask any more questions. We cannot read them after these last two. We've got to go to the closings. This one, they say, Mr. Barker, a society cannot function without shared moral norms. If laws only prevent direct harm, what happens when moral decay leads to systemic harm?

well then we have a catastrophe. We have a, you know, dissolved society. And it's a good thing that there are enough people who do respect the rule of law in our country and many countries that we try to adhere to. Unlike many current conservative Christians in their voting patterns who don't seem to respect the rule of law, we need to jealously guard that. We need to keep on top of it. We need to make sure that our systems and our policies

are for the common good. They are to minimize harm. They are to protect society from it. And if it falls apart, well then it falls apart. And it's happened before and it's happened in religious communities as well. This transcendent source of morals isn't helping a thing. We have natural human instincts and that's what we're trying to battle. Some people just have bad instincts or bad desires or bad brains. Some people even have tumors in their brains.

And so, yeah, you're not going to get it from a God, not from the God of the Bible. What we're going to get it from is with really more advanced enlightenment principles of true human justice that treats everybody the same and also respects. You don't see any of that kind of justice in the Bible. You just see retributive divine justice and divine punishment. You don't see deliberation. You don't see humanistic values. You don't...

The Ten Commandments says, thou shalt not kill, but it doesn't give any subtlety. It doesn't provide any real law there. So I guess I agree with the questioner that without a dedicated focus on keeping the system of law in place, societies can crumble. Yes. You got it. And this last one, I will defer to you on what this means. They say, could harm be replaced with another experience? Yes.

The only reason I say that is I think there may be using harm almost like it's synonymous with suffering, but I'm not sure if that's how you intended harm to be meant. Well, so the reason I use harm instead of pain, some people say pain is that sometimes pain is good. I mean, we, sometimes pain is very useful. Obviously it alerts us to problems that we have that we need to fix. But if pain was the measure of,

Well, then there would be no moral problem with me shooting somebody in the head while they're asleep. They would feel no pain, right? But obviously their organism is harmed, right? So that's the measure we're using. Actual physical biological harm in the real world is what we are by law and by custom and by society. At least I hope most of us are trying to make much less of that. You got it. And we're going to jump into the closings. As mentioned, folks...

Mr. Barker was willing to, you could say, allow the traditional format in which the affirmative actually usually gets the very first speech and then the very last speech. So we're going to switch our order where for the closings, Dan will go first for three minutes and then Stuart will go for three minutes for his closing as well. And that's, as I mentioned, intentional. The floor is all yours, Mr. Barker, for your closing.

Well, thank you. This has really been a lot of fun, and I appreciate the attitude and the camaraderie here. And I think we all learned something. I've learned some things tonight from Stuart, and I thank you for that, Stuart, and I hope you can say the same thing. When I was a believer, I was a true believer. And a lot of Christians today try to say, well, Dan, you didn't really know Jesus, and you didn't have the right way to interpret it.

I thought I did. I'm sure I felt it. And I saw answers to prayer. And I felt it in my heart. And I prayed in the spirit. And I preached and people were saved. And so the Bible says, you shall know them by their fruits. If I was not a true Christian, nobody is. That's how you know. And I felt it and I believe it. And if you don't believe me, then you're accusing me of being a liar. Friends from my past will tell you the same thing. I left it not because I didn't like it.

I left it not because I was hurt. I left it not because the church treated me badly. I think most of the time the church treated me quite well. I had some great Christian friends, and some of them are still friends today. So Stuart's attempt to psychoanalyze me is below the belt. I think it's outside the bounds of civil debate, because you can't psychoanalyze another person just from a five-minute talk here.

But when I finally realized that those things I mentioned before, there's no good evidence, there's no good coherent definition, there's no good argument, there's no agreement among believers,

There's no good answer to the problem of evil, and there's no need. There's actually no need for a God because millions, hundreds of millions of really good people live happy, moral, productive, loving lives without it. In many different countries, I realized, well, I guess I don't believe anymore, and what I was preaching is actually just false and not necessary. I sent out a letter to everybody.

including, I sent out maybe 50 or 60 letters to co-ministers, co-missionaries, Christian publishers, family and friends. My mom and dad were shocked. And my mom came all the way over to California. Let's talk with her preacher son, who now doesn't believe.

I didn't know that until she went back to Arizona. She stopped going to church. She started thinking. She says, I love Danny. We have a good family. We get along well. And I told her about some of those Old Testament stories about like Korah or Phineas or some of these other morally monstrous stories that are in the Bible.

and she stopped going to church, and after about a year, she said, you know what? Danny's right, and she became an atheist. My dad was arguing with me by mail, and after about a year later, my dad said, you know what? Danny's right, and my wife said, they both became, they stopped going to church, and my mom said, and Richard Dawkins quoted this in the foreword to my book, Godless, my mom said, you know what? It's so great being an atheist because you

I don't have to hate anymore. I don't have to say who's in and who's out. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Who are the homosexuals? Or the women having abortions? Or the people in this religion? She said, I can just slough all of that off, and I can just be a human being. And in her mind, there was no intellectual integrity to the teachings of the Bible. She realized that just being a good, loving mother. She just had a high school education.

And living a life without belief in God is immensely rewarding and fulfilling and freeing. Thank you very much for that closing, and we'll kick it over to Stuart for his closing as well.

The only reason why I said that Dan had some emotional bias is because he did not bring up, not even once, that there's any type of love in the Bible. He didn't bring up grace, not even once in the Bible, where the whole central message of the entire scripture, Old Testament through, talked to some of the best biblical scholars who are not Christians. We'll say that. Dostoevsky, as brilliant of a mind as he was,

did not come to believe in Christ and become a Christian through his intellect, through the evidence we've been talking about tonight. He came because he saw the grace and love when he walked into a Catholic church one day on Jesus hanging up on that cross and he stared at it four hours straight. And he said, surely if somebody impacted the world as much as this person has, who shows me that kind of love, then something is going on that I better check out and take more seriously. And he was melted to his core by it.

So even one of the most brilliant minds who's ever lived came to believe in Christ through the heart, firstly, then the brain, then the mind. So many come through the mind, then the heart. Many come through the heart, then the mind. So I would just be open to both. Dan, love you. Really love this discussion. Learn from you as well. And I like your heart posture too, even though you said abortion's a blessing. I still believe in your innate goodness.

And no, I think you're a great guy, though. And I appreciate this was a lot of fun.

I would still, though, just plead with you. Yes, there are some tremendously difficult passages on judgment in the Bible. God sets a high standard at times, and you have to have judgment and justice if you're going to have love, if you're going to stand up for the poor. You know, you said human rights were not based off of the Bible and that the Bible doesn't speak to human rights. My friend, 400 times in the Old Testament, the one that you do not like, that's all about justice and judgment, supposedly, 400 times, 400 times,

Talks about the widow, the orphan, and why we're to stand up for them. No other civilization, especially in that time period, talked about human rights, especially like that. And so I would, that's why I'm talking about this emotional bias piece where it's like, it's so obvious. Like in some religious textbooks, and you can nitpick the Bible on other topics, you could say, oh, it's up for interpretation. You know, you gotta be careful here. It is so obvious from one cover to the other

It's scary. And so that's why I look at Dan and I say, maybe you were what you thought was a Christian. Maybe you truly did understand grace and the cross of Christ and forgiveness and loving your enemy. Maybe you honestly did pray. And I'm sorry if you if you missed all that or if you honestly had it. And then you said, nope, not enough. Thank you for your sincerity. And thank you that you are an atheist. I appreciate that.

But then you got after the pragmatics again. Like you accused me at the start for just talking about the pragmatics. You went all pragmatics on me all of a sudden. You said, we don't need a God and we don't need Jesus. And he didn't even seem this way. It's like, we're not here to talk about whether we need, we're talking about, is it the truth? Are we being truth seekers or not? So that's another side of it that I just, I wasn't, I wasn't debating. I was here to give the evidence. And I think you did do a good job wrestling with the evidence. I'm not saying you didn't.

And then thirdly and finally, though, what's that? I can give you maybe 20 more seconds to be congruent with what I gave Dan. So Dan and everybody watching, I would just strongly encourage you to continue to chase after the real Jesus Christ. He's the hound of heaven. He's not going to force you into anything. He wants you, like Blaise Pascal talks about, he gives you plenty of evidence to come to him and not enough to reject when you reject him. He's going to respect your free will, respect your decision,

And so come to him if you believe that he is intellectually credible and existentially satisfying, and I believe he is emotionally to your heart, and he will never leave you nor forsake you. We also happen to have, related to exactly what you wrapped up with, Stuart, there was a question. Sorry, Blake, that I did miss your question. He got this in really early in the debate, and I missed it. He said, Stuart, in Luke 19.27, related to what you just said, it says, Jesus says to slay his enemies personally,

Before him. Is Jesus threatening us into a relationship with him, saying, believe in me or else? James, do you have that? I don't have that verse memorized. Let me look that up right now. Luke 19, 27. And in ESV, it's, but as for those enemies of mine who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me. But let me look at the surrounding verses.

So this was the parable of the 10 minas. So it was in a parable that Jesus said that. So in other words, like Jesus said that while telling a story, Jesus wasn't saying to slay people as like, like, Hey guys, it's me, Jesus slay, slay people. Right. Exactly. It's not like all of a sudden he became Muhammad and wasn't using the towel anymore and just the sword.

I think it does, though, get at the judgment of Christ. Like there will be a judgment day, even though I did talk to Dan about, you know, his understanding of hell might be more Dante's Inferno and the Lake of Fire. I'm not saying that there's not going to be whether it's outer darkness or fire or that's literal or metaphorical. We don't know. But there will be a judgment day for sure. And so I think a lot of Luke 1927 is getting at, you know, if you're going to just totally deny the authority of Christ, you're going to live your own way.

And then if you're going to do evil, yeah, there's definitely going to be judgment for that person. And there should be. Look at our judicial system. Thank heaven for it. There was one that Dell has. So Dell got this in on time, too. And if you can forgive me for missing these, they said this is for Mr. Barker. Could harm be replaced with another experience? Did I read that?

I think you did. That's right. We talked about... I don't know if I responded to that or not, about pain. Before we go, unrelated to this debate, there's a book coming out this year published by Eerdmans, which is a Christian publisher, called Has God Been Found? It should be out in the summer. It's a debate between me and Dr. Adam Lloyd-Johnson, the transcript, and then they enlisted six...

theistic scholars and six atheistic scholars to comment on our debate. Plus we had some additional rebuttals in it. And it's fascinating. It talks about all these issues in much greater depth than we had time to go into today. It's called, Has God Been Found? I'm going to add that link to the, so has God been found? I don't know if it's available yet, but...

I do want to remind you folks, oh, as well, okay, this is the one that I'm sorry, I read the wrong one. This is, even Lord had said, humans enjoy harming others, such as in revenge, war, or pranks. But my guess is, Dan, you'd probably say, even if you enjoy, if humans have like these weakened states in which they enjoy harming others, it doesn't mean it's good, maybe. But I'll let you speak for yourself. Well, all I will say is that's why we have laws.

There are some bad apples in the species and it's a matter of, I guess, genetic luck or maybe pollution or illness or whatever, but there are some bad actors.

And that's why we have laws and we should jealously guard and protect the laws that we do have to try to protect all of us. If a criminal is coming into your house, you don't fall on your knees to pray. You call the police. We have a system of justice, systems of protection and enforcement in place in a humanistic society that values human values. So yeah, and we all know there's, I mean, look at all the Catholic priests who are molesting children.

In fact, there's actually more Protestant pedophiles than there are Catholics, but Catholics are overrepresented, and those people are criminals, and they should be held accountable. And their faith is not protecting them from their urges and that, so more respect for a system of law. You got it. With that, I want to say, folks, thank you very much for watching, and...

Both of our guests are linked in the description box. Dan's and Stuart's links are there as well as in the description box for the podcast. I highly encourage you folks, even if you disagree, so you're like, well, I'm not going to check them out if I disagree. There's value in hearing their arguments straight from them. Namely, rather than hearing someone from your own

group or tribe, like summarizing what the opposition says in their critiques. This is a great opportunity for you to hear it firsthand by checking out their links, even if you disagree. So we're going to let our speakers go, but want to say one last time, thank you very much, Mr. Barker and Stuart. It's been a true pleasure to have you.

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