 All right ladies and gentlemen excited for the next debate. So first I'm going to introduce our speakers then I'm going to hand it off to Amy the moderator. So the biography for Michael Jones who is a graduate student in the in the philosophy program at the University of Arizona. He is the founder and president of Inspiring Philosophy Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization. Moreover introducing Thomas aka Holy Kool-Aid Thrill to have you here as well Thomas. Thomas is the leader of the YouTube channel Holy Kool-Aid with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and the organizer of the Faithless Forum. Thank you very much gentlemen for being with us. I'm going to hand it over to Amy our moderator for the debate who will share the format as well as get us started. Thanks so much Amy. Thank you so very much James and everyone here at DebataCon 2022 and tonight's format is going to be 15 minute openings for each followed by eight minute rebuttals back and forth 24 minutes of open dialogue or discussion and 25 minutes of Q&A with a final wrap up of closing statements from both sides and with that I'm going to hand it over to Holy Kool-Aid for their up to 15 minute opening. Thank you. Before I begin I want to thank my opponent Michael Jones for agreeing to this debate. Michael's channel and mine both take very similar approaches making laser focused heavily researched videos breaking down complex topics albeit on opposite sides of the religious aisle. I don't believe that either of us are married to our positions but we would prefer to go wherever the truth leads and I greatly respect that about Mike. I'd also like to quickly thank Modern Day Debate, Bob Russell and Amy Newman and James Kuntz for organizing and hosting and moderating this event and this debate and finally I'd like to thank each and every one of you guys for coming out here today to watch, learn and challenge your own positions or just watch me get creamed let's be honest. If that's the case you did pick a good day to come out here if you're coming to watch me get creamed because this is my first ever in-person debate and three days ago my doctor advised me against coming out here because I am still recovering from a motorcycle accident. He thought that it wouldn't be fair. I told my doctor that I know it's still not a fair fight but I'm not really sure what other advantages I can possibly give Michael to even the odds. This is an incredible thing that we're able to do to come out here and disagree publicly openly and peacefully because while Mike and I disagree on some things we're both able to agree in freedom of expression as well as freedom of and from religion as it's written into this nation's great constitution and that's part of what makes this country awesome. In many areas Mike and I share a common goal. We both believe in evolution by natural selection or at least evolution. We both believe neither one of us thinks that the earth is 6,000 years old. Neither of us believes in a global flood or that the Old Testament laws need to necessarily be followed and neither of us believes in a future antichrist or tribulation or literal eternal torturous hellfire for those who don't believe. In many ways I think Michael's interpretation of Christianity is less dangerous than that held by the majority of Christians today and that's great but it's far from the only one and today's topic the debate topic is is Christianity dangerous? I want to make sure that we're not talking past each other so we first need to determine what we mean by Christianity. If you were to ask a Jehovah's Witness, Bob Jones University and the Westboro Baptist Church all to separately come up with a definition of Christianity you'd likely get widely varied definitions which often include themselves while excluding wide swaths of other believers as not true Christians. I don't think that this is the way to go about it because it's not really for us to judge who is and isn't a true Christian so I prefer to go with a more academic and far more inclusive definition. Cambridge dictionary defines Christianity as a religion based on belief in God and on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and on the Bible. By this widely held definition there are over 2.38 billion Christians on planet earth. Granted there are thousands of different denominations. It is a gigantic tapestry. There's all different flavors. You have Catholics, Greek and Russian Orthodox, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Pentecostals and I could go on for hours countless others. You can believe in predestination as the Calvinists do or free will and yet both are part of this great tapestry. You can believe in salvation through faith alone based on Ephesians 2, 8 through 9 or based on James chapter 2 you can believe that faith without works is dead. Both of these positions are still a part of this massive tapestry. Christianity includes both those who believe it for their own sake or for its own sake and those who follow the Bible to get external recognition to find community or to gain rewards from other Christians. So long as their religious identity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus, a belief in God or on the Bible or and on the Bible then they fall into this definition. They fit the criteria of Christian. These are the three legs of the stool that makes up Christianity or that Christianity rests on and today we're here to analyze the stool of Christianity. So let's get to examining and determine if there are any clear and present dangers. I need to. All right now I need to stress that we're not here to debate whether or not Christianity is true. Something doesn't have to be false to be dangerous. We're not here we're not here to determine if Christianity is beneficial. Something can be or we're not here to debate whether or not Christianity is beneficial or can have can result in good or positive outcomes. We're not even here to talk about whether or not Christianity has a net positive or negative effect on people's health or well being. We're debating whether or not it's dangerous. For example, nuclear power has tremendous benefits to society, providing clean energy to millions of people and has even been used as a power source and outer space missions. But it would be foolhardy to ignore the inherent dangers with nuclear power and that's why nuclear engineers have created safeguards at every single nuclear reactor currently in use. Lastly, we're not here to talk about religion in general and the positive or negative effects that it can have on society. We're specifically focusing on Christianity and whether or not Christianity is dangerous. Anything else is irrelevant. So is Christianity dangerous? Well, first we have to determine how we figure out if something is or isn't dangerous. Fortunately for us, neither Michael nor I have to create our own standard. The United States government is constantly in the business of risk assessment and as an authority on the topic has developed a very clear three step process of assessing risk. Step one, you identify the hazard. This could be something like a fire, a tornado, terrorism, a cyber attack, a pandemic, etc. You look at the probability and magnitude of the effect. Has this happened before? What's the likelihood of it happening again? Once you've identified the hazard, you move to step two. What are the assets that are at risk? Vulnerability assessment. Are people at risk? Property, including buildings? Is it a supply chain? Is it your regulatory and contractual obligations that are at risk? Once you figure out what's at risk, what is the impact on what's at risk? Impact analysis is step three. It could be casualties. It could be property damage. It could be the interruption of your business, etc. You get the point. So once you've done that, we have to ask ourselves, can we take that and apply it to Christianity? Well, I think the first thing that we have to do is look at specific beliefs. When we're trying to figure out if something is dangerous, let's find something that's in common with the vast majority of Christians. I know that this is a bit of an old poll, but in 1996, time and CNN pulled a wide audience. And now, granted, this is back when a lot more people in America were Christian than they are today. But this audience included non-believers and believers alike. And they found that 82% of those surveyed believed in the personal power of prayer to heal. Now, if you factor into the fact that there were atheists, agnostics, and non-believers in the mix with that, then it can only be determined from these facts. I think it'd be fair to assert that that statistic is likely higher among believers than the population as a whole. That's a fairly high percentage. Is this belief Christian? Well, it certainly has roots in the Bible. For starters, you have verses like Exodus 23-25, worship the Lord your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water, and I will take away sickness from you. Mark 5-34, and he said to her daughter, your faith has made you well. If you're looking for faith healing, it's faith that led to the healing. Go in peace and be healed of your disease. James 5-16, the prayer of a righteous man has great power as it is working. Mark 11-24, therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you shall receive it and it will be yours. Matthew 10-1, and he called to him and his 12 disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and heal every disease and affliction. James 5-14, is anyone among you sick? Let him call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. All right, so it's clear that from these verses, you may say that some of them are taken out of context. You may say that, well, you're misunderstanding the original Greek or the original Hebrew, and that's fine. But the fact of the matter is that based on these verses, the vast majority of Christians have come to the conclusion that faith healing is possible, that there's some type of divine power in prayer. Okay, so does this bear out in reality? Well, according to a 2002 study by Dr. Avales, he found that when he took a number of groups and had intercessory prayer over them, he found that each patient in the prayer group that received prayer for at least a week had a daily prayer from five different people, had no statistical significant results after 26 weeks. Another study, 2005, Dr. Krukoff and colleagues found that prayer did not improve the outcomes of percutaneous coronary interventions in any significant way. Another study in this one's from 2005 from Dr. John Austin and colleagues found that prayer, whether it was done by a professional faith healer or by a nurse or no one at all in the control group, he found no detectable effect of prayer and benefits towards AIDS patients. Lastly, a massive study that was actually funded by the Templeton Foundation, which is a Christian organization, did a massive study of thousands of different people who were prayed over and found no benefit from prayer for those who didn't know that they were being prayed over and for those who knew that they were being prayed over, whether it was because of pressure or whatever reason, they found that they actually fared worse and they demonstrated worse recovery among cardiac bypass patients. And yet you have people like this, Peter Popoff. How many of you are familiar with Peter Popoff? This man was a faith healer with thousands of followers in the late 20th century and he would go around and he would hold these gigantic revival meetings and he would, you know, he'd reach out to the audience and he says, I hear on such and such street there's this woman who has lung cancer and he'd call her out by name and she'd come to the front and he'd pray over her and she'd be weeping and it was the spectacle to behold. There were a number of tricks that he would use and he eventually was exposed by a magician named James Randy. He had an earpiece in his ear. His wife would collect prayer cards with different people's information on them and then read the information over a radio receiver to him. James Randy and as well as a private investigator set up a box to detect the radio frequencies, caught the video live, caught the audio live, paired the two together. Peter Popoff was word for word repeating what was going through the audio signal. This man after this was made public on Johnny Carson. He went bankrupt only to come back a decade or two later and now he's still pulling the same charade and he's multi-millionaire, evangelical, what's it called, a prosperity doctrine pastor. Now you might say he's not a true Christian. The problem here, the danger with this isn't that someone like Peter Popoff is that the Bible leads to Peter Popoff. The problem is that these verses set people up to be able to fall for cons like this. He's not alone. There's a documentary called Marjo, it won an Academy Award back in the 70s where a young pastor, evangelical pastor, went around using faith healing methods, various tricks and would get massive audiences to come in, collect, you know, pass the offering, play it around, collect massive amounts of money and then book it to the next town. People think that they're healed, they throw away their medication and then they go and die of cancer. It's problems like this, it's verses like these that I've shown you that set people up to become made marks, to become gullible to this type of a situation. Many of these tricks were exposed by the mentalist and magician Darren Brown as well in his documentary, Miracles for Sale. He would show how sometimes faith healers would find someone who wasn't completely crippled and yet they were sitting, you know, they might have crutches and they come up and say, oh, here's a wheelchair, it'll be easier for you. They push them up to the front and then the pastor would heal or pray over them, they'd stand up, obviously they could somewhat walk because they had crutches, but all of a sudden the congregation sees them getting out of a wheelchair, it's a miracle. Case after case after case, there's hundreds of different tricks that they use, it's all been exposed. Another situation, faith healing parents, you have the shivals, they believed in faith healing that they didn't need to go to the doctor for modern medicine, instead they opted for faith healing. Their first child died of pneumonia, very curable, very treatable, simply needed some antibiotics, instead they opted for faith healing. The judge gave them a warning for neglect, child abuse and neglect. The parents, instead of taking it seriously, when their second kid got sick of pneumonia, again, they turned to prayer and anointing with oil, faith healing methods and their second child died. It's tragic, it's sad, but it happens and it's verses like these that are dangerous that lead to this kind of a situation. So the assets that are at risk with believing in this stuff, obviously your money, you can fall prey to charlatans who are calling you out of your money. Your health, if you throw away your medication and turn to this stuff rather than actually seeking proven, medically proven doctors and medicine, your reputation, if you fall for this, you can obviously be hugely embarrassed for falling for this and that's why a lot of people don't come forward when they have a situation like this that they fall and pray to. And in the worst situations, you're very life. So the impacts here, bankruptcy, sickness, humiliation and death. Let's take one other example you have. I'm going to skip through because you have people believing in divine protection. They take verses saying you'll be able to pick up serpents and you'll be able to drink deadly poison and it won't harm you. Too bad for them. This verse isn't even in the original manuscripts that we have of Mark and it was likely added later. And yet it's still in the Bible, it still represents a danger because people take it, they read it, they take it literally and they die. This isn't a new thing. Here's one pastor that happened to him and it happened to his father. And this is an article from 1974 where another snake handler had died after his dad had died of being bit by a snake as well. One more situation, the Orthodox church during the height of COVID before the vaccine believed that you couldn't get COVID from communion. So they would all share the same spoon and pass it around. Even in the midst of this, as this scandal was going on, you had an entire churches as one that I've covered on my channel in depth with over a thousand different members, hit it, swept it under the rug, said you can't get sick from communion, you can't get sick in church and even their own members, even their own pastors were passing away from COVID. I believe, am I at time? Now I have example after example after example. Unfortunately, I've ran out of time so I have to leave it there. The fact of the matter is when you identify the hazards and you link it back to the Bible, there's a clear and obvious direct line between danger and harm. Thank you very much. Thank you so very much Holy Kool-Aid for your opening statement and we are now going to pass it off to Inspiring Philosophy for their up to 15 minute opening statement. All right, well thank you. Thanks for having me. I'd like to thank moderate debate. I can thank Thomas for agreeing to the debate. Thank you for the opening statement. There's a lot there I'd like to respond to. But before we get that, I just want to say I really appreciate everyone coming out here. I hope we can have a good back and forth today. So let me just start by reminding people what the topic is today. The topic is not, are Christians dangerous? Anyone can point to examples of Christians doing bad things or dumb things, but that doesn't mean Christianity is necessarily the cause of negative behavior. The Bible says all humans are sinful depraved and this is the reason we need Christianity. The topic is, is Christianity dangerous? In mere correlations and anecdotal evidence is hardly evidence that Christianity is the cause of bad or stupid behavior. I can find numerous examples like the League of Militant Atheists or Atheists in general doing bad things, but to be absurd for me to argue like Tanisha Tsuza that this means atheism is the cause. This is actually called an attribution error. In psychology this is when you unjustifiably attribute an effect to someone because of the beliefs or personality traits they have but do not do the same when someone in your group does something bad. This would be like saying look I saw a priest do something bad, it must be because of his religion, but if a secular humanist did the same thing, well you know there's circumstantial stuff that you can't blame secular humanism because secular humanism doesn't advocate for such behavior. Basically it's when you claim your actions, the actions of the members of your own group are situational but the actions of members of other groups are related to their beliefs. To show Christianity is dangerous or causes harm you have to need to find a place in the Bible where you think there was a negative quality taught. Then show this verse actually means how you interpret it. Most Christians agree this is how to properly interpret that and then show evidence this belief results in horrible effects in society and individuals. For example some atheists will say that Matthew 10 34 where Jesus says I can't bring not peace but a thord means Jesus is promoting violence. They need to show that is the proper interpretation. Most Christians agree with this interpretation and empirical evidence that shows violence is related to Christians acting out from this command. Problem is these are all leaps and logic and you need more than just just non sequiturs you need actual evidence of connections. Generally what many atheists like Phil Zuckerman or Gregory Paul do is they look at ecological correlations but not individual correlations and this can result in an ecological fallacy which a David A. Freeman says this is when you you think relationships observed for groups necessarily hold for individuals. If countries with more fat in the diet have higher rates of breast cancer then women who eat more fatty foods must be more likely to get breast cancer. These inferences may be correct but are only weakly supported by the aggregate data. It is all too easy to draw incorrect conclusions from aggregate data. Let me give two examples. This study found there was more tolerance for Muslims in secular countries but when individuals were looked at within these countries researchers were surprised to find and I quote the strongest anti-Muslim attitudes are nonetheless found among the non-religious in these countries. Ecological and the individual correlation and I'll line up. Additionally Christians tend to be in more conservative areas which have less environmentally friendly regulations and laws. However when individuals were looked at researchers concluded we can assert there is no evidence that any of our measures of religiosity intensify the negative political conservatism effect. We provide evidence that the strongest negative conservative effects are found among those who are the least religious. So when you look at individuals we can see that there is pro environmental attitudes associated with religion despite what the ecological correlation shows. Now if Christianity is dangerous a good way to show that would be to look at war and violence. So does Christianity lead to war and conflict? Well there was one study that looked at interstate armed conflict initiation and if it's associated with Islam Christianity and Buddhism. The conclusion was interstate armed conflict initiation is found to be negatively associated with Christianity mildly positively associated with Islam and not associated with Buddhism. So if anyone's debating Muslims come see me. So as you can see Christianity was negatively related to interstate conflict. Another study found religiosity was negatively associated with a willingness to fight in territorial disputes. Another study or moving on if you go through the encyclopedia of wars you can see very few wars have religion as the primary motivator. And we use it as subtractive as long you can see the percentage is cut half. Now we can also say there was an exorbitant amount of data that shows Christian religiosity is inversely related to crime and violence. This is a 2001 meta-analysis. It found crime was inversely related to religion. Now also to note a meta-analysis is not just one study. It takes data from multiple studies combines them into the meta-analysis to try to find a general trend across multiple studies. Similarly a 2010 systematic review looked at 270 studies found that in 90% crime is inversely related to religion. Only 2% only two studies excuse me found religion was positively associated with crime. That's important I'll come back to that later. A 2014 study looked at over 180 young adults and adolescents and found that religiosity was inversely related to crime like drugs selling and theft. A 2014 meta-analysis looked at over 190,000 young adults and adolescents over 62 studies and found that religiosity was inversely related to crime things like theft robbery assault and murder. Additionally religiosity seems to correspond with lower levels of direct and indirect aggression. Intrinsic religiosity facilitates an increase in self-control. Greater religiosity was associated with higher levels of compassion and self-control. But this is just religiosity in general right? Anything about Christianity here? Well when you study the sample sizes in these studies you'll find they predominantly draw from Christian sample sizes in Western nations. As one study put it a large portion of the existing research has largely focused on Western nations. And a study that wanted to do specifically on Buddhist had to note on Buddhist they said as a mainstream religion in Western society Christianity is typically the religion that is the focus for this type of research. Now how do we know the benefits of Christianity come from the religious beliefs and not just external factors associated with religion? Like social structures and forming communities. When I debated Matt Dilla Huntie this was his argument. Well luckily a large portion of the research divides subjects between up between two orientations which can shed some light on this subject. The first is extrinsic religiosity. Now extrinsic religiosity is uh these individuals are religious as a means to an end. They're not motivated by religion. What is religious because not because they believe the core tenets of the faith but because they want to be part of a community getting social status or because it's a family tradition. The extrinsic type turns to God or turns to God but without turning away from the self. Some qualify as intrinsically religious. These individuals find that their religion is their primary motivator. If one is intrinsically religious they are religious because they want to hold to the core tenets of a faith. Having embraced the creed the individual endeavors to internalize and follow it fully. So if the anti-theist is correct and the benefits Christianity provide come from creating social structures communities or extrinsic factors associated with religion then more benefits should be associated with the e-scale. But if the intrinsic religiosity is associated with more benefits then the benefits of Christian religiosity should come from the or if they're more associated with intrinsic then the benefits more likely come from the tenets and beliefs of the worldview. So in a nutshell to know if Christianity is dangerous it's better to look at the effects of intrinsic religiosity. When we look at the data there's more benefits associated with the e-scale intrinsic. So a meta-analysis found intrinsic religiosity tends to correlate with desirable variables like mental health, altruism and religious commitment. One looked at 34 studies and found aspects of intrinsic religiosity were associated with better mental health. Meta-analysis found religiosity correlates with agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness and when you look at people those were identified as mature in religion they identified with they aligned with four of the big five personality traits and negatively correlated with eroticism. Another meta-analysis found there was positive benefits from intrinsic religiosity and on extrinsic or ritualistic aspects of Christianity. Now similarly moving on a review found that religious motivators is associated intrinsic is associated with higher self-control and self-regulation and the researchers noted they predominantly drew from Christian backgrounds. Another found intrinsic religiosity was negatively associated with depression. When it comes to suicide the study author says it appears that commitments to the beliefs and rituals of Christianity is more of a protective factor for suicidal behavior than the indirect benefits such as the social relationships that might develop from regular church attendance. Additionally a meta-analysis did something this is a little bit different it drew on Christian sample size to look and noted that Christian priming religious priming was associated with pro-social behavior. This is when individuals are primed with religious study prayer and then study next to a control group. It was found that priming with religious motivators resulted in more pro-social behavior. So moving past this to religiosity in general one survey 850 studies and found religious involvement is generally associated with greater well-being less depression anxiety greater social support and less substance abuse. Another found that 15 looking at 15 studies noted that religiosity was associated with better grade point average in test scores in black and Hispanic American youth. Now this is only scratching the surface of the research I could draw of. Now of course there was some research that doesn't show positive benefits as I noted earlier and it's very easy to find studies or anecdotal examples that show Christian religiosity is associated with negative outcomes. For example this systematic review looked at 444 studies on depression religiosity and found that most show religion and spirituality are negatively correlated with depression but 6% reported greater depression which is about 26 studies. So couldn't someone just write an article saying that over 25 studies and I modified a salon article for this have showed that religion is associated with higher levels of depression. Now it would sound impressive but it would be cherry-picked data. We need to look at systematic reviews meta-analyses and a collection of the data to find the overall trend which shows Christian religiosity is positively associated with numerous benefits and there was no strong evidence to show it's dangerous or at least horrible consequences when we take into account the available data. I also want to talk about something else here. Does Christianity lead to LGBT prejudice? The intuitive answer is things to think yes but in four slides I'm going to try to show you otherwise. So a meta-analysis did find intrinsic religiosity was positively correlated with negative attitudes of homosexuality but they also noted much of the homosexual prejudice of fundamentalists is in excess of what is required by the religious ideology. Therefore non-doctrinal factors associated with religiosity might also contribute to prejudice. This was also sort of backed up in a layer cross-cultural analysis the meta-analysis I just showed you only focus on U.S. This one looked in 79 different countries. They found that people who are more intrinsically motivated tend to be less homonegative. Intrinsic religious motivated people have higher tolerance. They also noted there's a lot of cultural artifacts so the longer homosexual activity has been compliant with the law the lower homonegativity of the citizen. More homonegativity was found among those who were older had lower income less education these things. So researchers noted there's some sort of cultural factor going on here which other research has sort of indicated. So other studies have found that much of the LGBTQ prejudice might be mediated by right-wing authoritarianism and traditionalism which a really good study actually looked at this more in depth and they factored out the different mediating effects and sample size out of various different people of different backgrounds in Brazil. They said the factor traditionalism fully mediated the path connecting religiosity and prejudice towards sexual and gender diversity that it only reduced the magnitude of the association from point three zero to a negative point two three. So it actually reversed it it showed that when you factor out traditionalism and right-wing authoritarianism religiosity is negatively correlated with prejudice. It is not religiosity itself or the degree of religious practice that motivates prejudice but rather the degree of adherence to traditional values. Now doesn't Christianity lead to right-wing nationalism or right-wing authoritarianism? Well no there's actually some research that shows the opposite. So this study found that the strongest anti-immigration policies are found among non-active Christians. So the more you become secular the more you move away from Christianity the more you move into anti-immigration policies. Specifically this study found we have found no evidence that Christian nationalism, mobile-life church-based support in the election. This is demonstrated by the fact that in our results Christian nationalism is only strongly associated with Trump's support for voters who do not attend religious service. So ironically if you want to get rid of these kind of things you should be encouraging people to be more religious if they're on the right for example according to these studies because that'll decrease some of these things. So I want to conclude by this overall we can say Christianity is not dangerous it is a net gain for society. Christianity can be comparable to hospitals. It's the dangers of Christianity going on out there. I can see that. The overwhelming evidence shows hospitals are a positive benefit. However sometimes people have botched surgeries or have negative outcomes in hospitals. But we would not conclude hospitals are dangerous from isolated cases, small percentage, and anecdotal evidence. We can find those examples all day. We have to look at the overall data, meta-analysis, systematic reviews, and a collection of the data to find the overall effects of intrinsic religiosity from Christianity. The overwhelming evidence shows that Christianity has positive benefits and the negative effects on individuals and societies is relatively low to zero. There is very little to little to no evidence you can show that Christianity leads to dangerous effects because the studies show it leads to so many positive effects. If it's showing so many positive effects there's no reason to conclude it creates any sort of danger. And as you noted sometimes the dangerous aspects associated with religious individuals can come from other aspects. Traditionalism, low education, right wing authoritarianism, left wing authoritarianism, you name it. Just because you see a religious person doing a bad thing, that doesn't mean the Christian religiosity caused that. And that's why we rely on researchers to help us find these conclusions. And with that I will conclude my time. Thank you. Thank you so very much inspiring philosophy for your opening statement. And with that we are going to hand it back over to Holy Kool-Aid for their up to eight minutes. Fantastic. Thank you. I want to look at a number of different things that you said. First of all it still seems to me like we're having two different debates. I want to focus specifically in on Christianity and I feel like inspiring philosophy still is talking about intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. We need to make a distinction there. When he says things like with the study on 79 different countries I actually have it right here. I've read through this study and when he says that when you look at you shift it from looking at purely intrinsic religiosity to or from extrinsic religiosity to intrinsic religiosity you see less of a connection. But there's still a connection and all throughout this paper one of the strongest points that they made was that there was a very strong connection across the board with these countries when it came to the link between religiosity and homonegativity and it was even stronger among Muslim and Christian countries and it was the weakest among Buddhist and atheist countries. So to just completely write it off simply because there's you know less of an effect with intrinsic religiosity I don't think that that's fair and of course there's going to be other factors that come into play with this type of thing that you know you're you're not looking just for one linear connection with this type of thing. Of course correlation doesn't equal causation that's kind of the golden rule of statistics but you can oftentimes have a non-linear connection. What do I mean by that? It means that you can have religiosity leading to homonegativity in addition to other factors leading to homonegativity as well and that's what they found in this study that's why you perform a multivariant analysis. They're not just looking at one factor they're factoring it all in breaking it down trying to separate them out and they found a very very strong link between homonegativity or bias and prejudice towards the LGBT and religiosity especially strongly among Christianity and that's far from the only study that says that. If I had time before in my last one there was a slide I was going to get to that talked about another study that found a strong link between homonegativity and Christianity and here's the problem with that is you can say okay you know so maybe there is some type of a link but you know it's it's not like how does this lead to harm well one study from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that shunning can lead to increased tribalism and hostility towards the outgroup. Another study found that ostracism leads to an increase in depression so when you have these things that people are you're you're not just simply pulling out of the blue saying you know hey I think that there might be some correlation between these things you go when you ask people what is your motivation for doing this why are you acting this way towards members of the LGBT community what is your reason for anti-transbigatory or for persecuting gay people or shunning them or kicking them out of the house pushing them towards suicide and you know pushing them towards higher rates of depression what's the reasoning behind this and you get bible verses like 2nd Corinthians 614 do not be yoked no sorry not that one there's um a man shall not lie with another man as one does with a woman if you do so you shall be stoned you know you look at verses like this you look at verses in romans you look all throughout the bible and there's verses that can be interpreted that way very easily and they are this isn't my interpretation i'm not saying this is the way it should or shouldn't be interpreted i'm saying this is the way that christians are in mass oftentimes by the hundreds of millions majority position interpreting these verses and it is their direct statement for why they are acting in a particular way so you can say correlation doesn't equal causation but you go and you say okay what is the motive if this was a jury and we had someone on trial and we asked them why did you kill this person and they say well i saw him you know sleeping with my wife you wouldn't say well maybe you're mistaken correlation doesn't equal causation you know that could have been the cause it could have been the motive no you trust them you take them at their word and that's what each one of these studies is doing the studies that he looked at dividing religion into intrinsic versus extrinsic they're using a scale that was developed by gordon is it gordon alport alport alport in to to look at you know intrinsic versus extrinsic religiosity that's it's called the r os scale and the r os scale is entirely self um self dictated so it's it's a poll it's a survey you ask someone how religious are you do you do this do you engage in this do you believe this and it's self reported you trust them you take them at your at their word so if you're going to say correlation doesn't equal causation but then you have people directly saying this belief in this verse this reason is the reason why i'm going out and doing these things and engaging in these behaviors that are harmful and we see a direct link between the action and the harm and then you go and you say well you know that's correlation causation we can't really take them at their word for that but then over here you have people self reporting why you know their level of religiosity and their beliefs and and how it's making them feel better and making them better off mentally you're going to take them at their word for that like that's that's a double standard it doesn't work that way the other problem that we have to look at is a problem with meta analyses as a whole now i've i've been involved in social science for a while one of my degrees is in social sciences specifically a political science and um i'm not going to write off meta analyses i'd be a fool to do that there's a lot of strength in that and i'll acknowledge that you know michael has done his due diligence in gathering these studies meta analyses have a tremendous amount of power and they shouldn't be ignored and yet at the same time there's there's a couple of things that you have to be cautious of for example here's a meta analysis called if you love me you'll keep my commandments a meta analysis on the effects of religion and crime by um collin j by uh buyer and he found that there was after you know performing a massive meta analyses on 60 different studies that looked at the connection between crime and religion he found that overall there was you know a negative association so as you became more religious you tended to to commit less crime right and yet at the same time within this study there are studies that a part of this meta analysis that specifically account for why that may be the case now uh one study was released by lee ellis called religiosity and criminality from the perspective of arousal theory the theory that he put forth was that people who typically are under aroused so let's say i'm under stimulated and i'm bored by a church service i'm bored sitting around i want to go out and do something that causes an adrenaline rush maybe i'm you know adhd you name it i may be more inclined to um not be a part of a religion and i also might be i'm more inclined to commit violent acts so there you have an external factor that's leading to an increase in crime and the religion is not necessarily relevant as soon as he factored in arousal theory the connection between decreased violence and religiosity went away this isn't a one-off study it was replicated john cochran released a study on this as well where where he looked at the report that ellis put out and tried to replicate the results got exactly the same result now when you take a meta analysis you can say oh you could cherry pick these studies the problem is the meta analysis doesn't take these factors into effect or into account all it does is it looks at the overall number and it says okay so there's you know 55 studies that came to this conclusion five that came to whatever but if all 55 of the other ones were using the same methods or the same you know uh reporting methods and not looking at this one thing or taking it into account of course you're going to have skewed data so i would caution you when it comes to looking at meta analysis to be a little bit more careful with that um i believe with that i'm at time but there's more that i'll get to in our back and forth thank you so very much holy kool-aid for your eight minute rebuttal and with that we're going to hand it right back over to inspiring philosophy for your eight minute rebuttal okay one second all right well thank you for that thomas i appreciate the feedback let's try go for these points as quickly as i can this is why i noted that you talked about i'm talking about more in the e and i scale this is why i noted that i'm predominantly the researchers predominantly draw from christian nations those are the primary parts of the subject you brought up meta analyses and you noted that uh that there are limitations i absolutely agree that's why i drew on multiple studies and i also went over the aspects of intrinsic religiosity and how it leads to more self-control self-regulation altruism and pro-social behavior of course there are other factors that reduce crime that can factor in those studies but when we look at specifically the effects of religious motivators they do contribute to effects that would reduce crime you talked about the e i scale being uh kind of subjective that's i feel like that's simplifying it that there no one comes into a room and goes are you intrinsic or extrinsic they take certain tests they ask them certain questions and these professionals come to the conclusion that they're going to pry and try to get answers to them they're not going to readily admit right away they're going to try to get more details from them before they actually so they don't actually tell them what their beliefs are there's a lot sure that's not a perfect science but this is why we do it in multiple studies and multiple studies are finding the overall same conclusion when we keep factoring that in now you talked about the homonegativity aspect in that one study we need to be clear about what homonegativity is it can it doesn't necessarily mean prejudice in the very paper you cited it said self-reported homonegativity does not necessarily correspond to the implicitly existing aversion to homosexuality it can mean an intellectual disapproval it's defined differently from various studies we have to keep that in mind so this is why i also brought up the other studies that talk about how when you factor out other things like traditionalism and right-wing authoritarianism a religiosity does not really account for the prejudice there that's something we need to keep in mind uh so what else did i want to get to here so um i think i got to a lot of it there i do want to talk about how your overall talking about how religiosity uh christian religiosity people can interpret verses and then do all sorts of horrible things from with that well i mean you could do that with just about anything i could interpret the pills very dough boarded to telling me that i'm going out to shoot out and kill people that doesn't mean that the the company is responsible if a crazy person does that and goes out and kills people someone could interpret the tenets of um marxism to say it's time to go up and start shooting capitalists like right now that would not necessarily mean that marxism is necessarily the cause it would if unless they're directly promoting it and that we understood marx directly is interpreted as that's what he's saying in his interpretation then we could say such a thing we need to do more than just say oh someone use this as their excuse so a lot of times as i've noted in a lot of these studies people can cite that kind of thing but their motivators are more they're sort of using this as like the means to an end uh for example in the whole christians right-wingers moving away from christianity into more secular ideas there's a researcher named roger brubaker any right any right says when christians in western europe start becoming more secular they're especially the right-wing secularism is redefined as an ideology of a right of the right and the right is also appropriating liberal themes like gender equality and tolerance homosexuality the most secularized regions of the world being characterized in regional civilizational terms christianity is redefined as a matrix of liberalism, sexuality, gender equality, and gay rights he said this in a new christianist secularism in europe in 2016 what he's basically pointing out is that a lot of times when people get more secular they often take christian themes and they reinterpret them in all sorts of secular ways to sort of fit what they're doing that doesn't mean christianity is necessarily the cause because they're taking themes and they're reinterpreting it recently the atheist historian nathan johnstone in this book the new the new atheist myth and history noted that this is what a lot of the nazis did as they took a lot of christian themes reinterpreted them in their nazi ideology to help convince public to try to bring them along they were using christian terms and whatnot so just because you bring up somebody may have taken a verse or whatnot and said well this is the reason doesn't necessarily mean christianity is the cause this is why it's better to rely on studies not necessarily on anecdotal cases like this so when it comes to a lot of that stuff we need to start focusing on what the data shows sure you can always find anecdotal cases but that doesn't tell us what they mean by christianity that doesn't tell us if they're actually drawing from the full understanding of christian doctrine we need to be careful with that because nathan johnstone for example in his book notes that there were many atheists who looked at what atheism was what secularism was and they thought it was this idea they need to wipe out religion by all means necessary the league of militant atheists he talks about in this book in this ussr now he explicitly says atheism does not necessarily cause this bad behavior it was these wackos reinterpreting ideas they had gotten and using it to sort of eradicate religion he says it's a fact people have died in the name of atheism to quote directly from him in his book he says we must accept that there was a significant atheist component to the crime and forced collectivization and that it provides insight into the potential forms and meanings of atheist violence it says on page 206 on page 181 he says uh the oppression of believers by atheists and in the name of atheism itself is simply an historical fact now i don't think eight i agree with him that atheism is not necessarily the cause but just because they interpreted an atheistic worldview uh that doesn't and use it as part of their ideology doesn't necessarily mean it's the cause likewise uh people can draw christianity into a larger worldview and say it's what's modding that venom motivating them to do certain things it doesn't necessarily mean it's the cause johnson doesn't make that claim and neither should we we should look at what the data indicates when they were studied by professionals or experts in the field of psychology and social science and with that i'll conclude and we can move on thank you very much for your rebuttals and with that we are going to move into about 24 25 minutes of open discussion once again gentlemen the floor is on would you like to start uh you go ahead okay um i want to ask you real quick about um your pillsbury doughboy example you said that if you have you know hallucinations about you know the pillsbury doughboy or something i forget your exact wording but it was like if you thought that he was telling you to go out and commit harm it doesn't necessarily mean that the pillsbury doughboy is dangerous was that sort of well i wouldn't say the company caused it yeah the company caused it but that's not really what we're asking we're not asking does christianity like is this the correct interpretation of christianity does correct interpretation does correct christianity caused this result what we're asking is is it dangerous if you had the pillsbury doughboy releasing you know don't or uh confectionary goods what have you and you have hundreds of millions of people all seeing the pillsbury doughboy and having these hallucinations pretty soon you'd start to ask some questions and be like hey what's going on like at that point you know you wouldn't necessarily know what the link is but would you at least start to admit that maybe there's a danger there that i wouldn't say they'd say red flag something could be up but i mean like if we're going to go into hypotheticals maybe it's you know maybe the conspiracy theorists are right and the cia is using 5g towers to manipulate people and they're just they put some sort of secret waves under the commercial or whatnot i again i wouldn't blame the company i'd say it's a red flag i say we got to investigate this more you see if if someone told me that atheism leads to you know tremendous atrocities and horrific things and murder and stuff and i actually was able to find you know example after example where the overwhelming majority of cases of atheists are actually interpreting something that they have some sort of core doctrine that they're interpreting in a negative and harmful way and i can demonstrate that i would a hundred percent agree with you that it's dangerous and i would say what can we do to safeguard and protect against it what can we do to prevent this from happening and that's what that's what i'm trying to say with christianity is i'm not saying that every christian is dangerous or that it necessarily a hundred percent of the time leads to these outcomes by any stretch because like there's lots of great christians there's lots of tolerant christians there's lots of loving christians out there that the point of this is i'm saying can we at least recognize that there are dangers that we have to be careful of well i mean that's with anything that's why i gave talked about hospitals so you're saying christianity is dangerous i'm not saying christianity is dangerous i'm saying there's dangers that are just and that's the that's the low bar hospitals are dangerous because you would have to conclude that oh hospitals are dangerous because bot surgeries could happen if that's if that's what you're trying to get out there that that creates all sorts of philosophical issues and understandings of how we're going to structure society and i wouldn't even say that christianity is necessarily the cause because when you look at the overall data we're seeing positive benefits we're not seeing the idea that multiple people are sort of getting this idea and running wild with it there could be issues with mental states of some of these people i think it's with some of those faith healers for example i i would say there's could be things parts of their psychology that are causing them to factor that in and cause them to two bad things how would you determine that how would you how would you determine if there's a causal link between their religion and like what would what would it take for you to be convinced well i i get put up that slide earlier i said so again if you go to my example matthew 1034 i've come to not bring peace but a sort first thing to do is make sure we're interpreting that correctly in the context you got to agree that most christians agree this is how to interpret it and even from that then you have to also show that there is some sort of evidence that people that christians have that command and now they think from that command they got to go out and do violence and you can show using some sort of study that it actually is causing christians to commit violence so again the three steps you got to show proper interpretation there is yes christians do agree this is how to properly interpret it and then there is evidence in social sciences is causing benefits but how do you get two point almost two point three or whatever it is billion christians to all agree on one thing they can't agree on what a pulpit should be made for sure we do we all christians orthodox catholic protestant all agree on core doctrines trinity uh virgin birth resurrection inspiration of scripture uh second coming i mean we all agree on those we agree on a lot of things we agree that um the first book of the new testament is matthew we read paul wrote uh you know first chrithians roman second chrithians we agree on all that stuff so you can get christians to agree on that it's not a very long list i can keep going if you would like i mean we all agree that there is a god we all agree that there the problem here is that interpretations are subjective right so my interpretation of a bible verse and you know a christians interpretation of a bible verse and your interpretation are going to be wildly different not not necessarily but it is the case in a alarming number of situations and so if if you say okay we have to get to the original doctrine how do we even go about doing that like you could say okay we go back to the original greek we go back to the original hebru how many people on planet earth right now speak ancient hebru or speak koine greek look interpretation stuff yeah i know you speak greek you stay out of this interpretation stuff i understand is always going to be an issue this is why i say there's three steps in here are most christians agree believe that jesus is telling them to commit violence no and we don't see that in the studies as well now i know that's an extreme example and i want to be sure everyone knows i'm not accusing you of making that argument but again i understand interpretation can do that but when it comes to things like how to live your life most christians are going to draw from places like the sermon on the mount uh the lord's prayer john 316 paul talking about how uh the lost of the been the love thy neighbor kind of thing but you can have you can have all of those things and you know and i can go through and agree with you on certain you know core tenants of the bible and say yeah this one's great this one is you know beneficial to society and we're not going to disagree there but like i said with the nuclear power example like you can have benefits and still have dangers that you have to be cognizant of and i would think that if you have a a text that's so rife for misinterpretation where you have hundreds of millions of people in in some cases believing in things and then attributing it to their to to the the scripture that they follow and it's like okay at the very least you have a book that is can very dangerously and easily be misinterpreted well i mean it get that is setting such a low bar that you have to conclude uh well you know you get kitchen knives are therefore dangerous hospitals are therefore dangerous vaccines are dangerous because like 0.001 percent get an autoimmune reaction kind of thing uh this is setting such an incredibly low bar that it just everything just reduces to absurdity in a lot of ways if that's our metal to say yes it's dangerous well then yeah we all have to agree but we also have to agree atheism is dangerous i mean i could cite this one study that i was going to bring up in a past debate but i didn't get time to where talked about that in when people have a they looked at various religious views christianity islam animism all these different types of views and what they found was it was the study was in 2016 moralistic gods supernatural supernatural punishment and the expansion of human society and they said people from diverse religious communities in eight different countries around the world researchers found that those who believe in moralistic punitive and all-knowing gods were more likely to be impartial and engage in pro-social behavior now just from that alone i could say well i then i guess we can show it's dangerous that if you reject this kind of god it you know you're going to reject these kind of behaviors and you could lead to bad behavior by that logic you'd have to conclude that atheism or the rejection of this kind of this all-knowing powerful god is dangerous because it could potentially lead to something bad but again this said this reduces everything to absurdity at this point well the the problem that again that that we're having here is that you have christians who are specifically attributing their actions to the core tenets that they're that they're following and so that you know they're saying this is the reason why i'm doing it it's it's because of this verse and so it's like if they have this belief system they're tying it to a verse it's happening you know in the hundreds of millions you're seeing a strong connection and you know multivariant analyses you're seeing that there's connections between these harmful actions and these belief systems and then maybe this will help you know you have a peer-review meta-analysis saying that beliefs inform actions not only do beliefs inform actions but you're more likely to act on a particular belief when it's firmly held when it's regularly reinforced when it's a core part of your identity when it's everything that that that fits it like that the church fits this description like a hand in a glove when you're you know you're going to church every single Sunday you're reinforcing these beliefs they're strong beliefs you are going to act on those beliefs now that in and of itself is just human psychology that's not necessarily bad we all act on our beliefs but what this is doing is it's categorically tying belief to action so if if you say okay here's a book you know that that people are reading and they're interpreting in mass sometimes majority consensus because this is it is subjective to some extent and you know it's a hundred percent subjective in how you you know read and interpret and so you're reading a book majority opinion is coming to certain conclusions that are harmful and then people are acting on it that right there is a recipe for danger that is a dangerous recipe and if you want to be obtuse about it and say well anything is dangerous water is dangerous it's like how many hundreds of millions more people have to commit atrocities based off of that before you say hold up i acknowledge that there's a danger here there might be some great benefits and that's cool like i'm happy to to say that there are benefits but at what point are we going to say we have to take the danger seriously well then we have to address them let me respond with this then okay so if beliefs inform actions all the time then we can just go to again atheists historian Nathan Johnstone when he talked about how a lot of times the militant the militant league of atheists in the USSR used their commitment to an atheist worldview to justify the idea that they could go out and commit these atrocities and again the study i cited noted that when you lack of belief in god like that it tends to move away from sort of good social behaviors we can see by that logic any sort of belief in atheism could of course result in sort of bad things and we have to acknowledge there's a danger there i mean for example Nietzsche said when one gives up on the christian faith one pulls the right the rights to the christian morality right from under his feet but let me finish here tom haulen of course builds up on that and says the same thing because one of the things for example john stone is noting in his book is that you're right beliefs often do inform actions but atheism itself is not just a belief that there is no god end of story it then opens up questions of morality the john stone's questions of our place in the universe questions of what we can do those beliefs could very well have just said they inform the actions of the militant league of atheists and all the bad things they did but again i feel like that's oversimplifying it i feel like we're taking dangerous and interpreting the word dangerous and an extremely vague understanding to the point where the sages everything is dangerous there's no way to run a society or to judge a worldview or anything like that we got to look at things specifically that come from it and the best way to look at it is what comes out of through social science and psychology studies and that was a tremendous exercise in what aboutism it was okay well you know okay if you're gonna say that christian is dangerous what about atheism it can be dangerous too okay if we if you want to have another debate called is atheism dangerous so you're saying atheism can be dangerous i'm saying that there may be some some things that's not what's on trial today there may be some dangers i'm happy to have that discussion at another time that's not what we're here to talk about what we're here to talk about is is christian dangerous and when i present a very clear cut case of how you have something that's right for misinterpretation and i show the link to the dangers that are caused and you say well but in that case anything can be dangerous what about atheism i'm like no like you're missing the point i showed a clear cut case of how christianity can lead to harmful dangerous things and it's not just happening as a one-off like this is happening at scale and i like i just want an acknowledging that because as soon as you start saying well you know this other thing can be dangerous and that can be dangerous too it's like okay but at least admit that this is dangerous too so our hospital is dangerous to you i mean if if they can be there can be aspects of them that are see i feel like we're defining dangerous differently then and i just simply don't agree that that is a qualification to say that a worldview is dangerous because someone could take it reinterpret it and use it however they want and i would also push back on the actual motivators of the person are they getting the motivators from the verse or are they getting the motivators from they like i want to do something bad let me find a verse to justify it and i'll run wild with it i we see people do that all the time with all sorts of different ideologies all sorts of different things but that doesn't mean the ideology is causing it they have some sort of motivators inside of them that are causing them to want to do a bad thing and they're just looking for justification so i mean if we're going to do that i could say you could say christianity is can be used as a justification for someone who wants to do bad things but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the cause this is why we i correlated the difference between factoring out the religious motivators and showing what is actually causing the bad behavior you got to go a little bit further than that you got to actually show that you know there is an actual link here other than someone grabbed a verse to justify their actions okay let's run with that let's say that they that they did the bad thing first and then they use the religion to justify it afterwards like a post hoc justification right okay if if that's what's going on you still have a bible that can easily be used to justify horrible things after the fact if i were to take for example let's say that i were to take a book you know a kid's book that says you know just love everyone and be good to all the people around you and that's all that's in the book it would be very very very hard to take the fundamentals of that book and interpret it in a negative way i'm sure there could be someone who could you know do all kinds of mental gymnastics to get there but you're not going to have people doing it in mass you're not going to have like people on a large scale interpreting it to come to these incredibly dangerous conclusions now if on the other hand if let's say that you have you know churches that are like maybe the maybe the pastor is already a bigot ahead of time maybe he is already you know incredibly racist and he uses he acts in a racist way and then he justifies it afterwards if his whole congregation takes a look at it and says oh well you know i guess the bible you know makes it all right because this verse says you know and he was able to justify it like that no that's not a justification for racism and people are willing to look away and and turn their their eyes when they think that the bible mandated it and so therefore it's okay whether it comes before or after doesn't really make any difference it's still able to justify horrible things do you see the the connection there i mean but again this is just reducing to absurdity you can justify your actions with anything you want you could do like the ussr did well we there's no god is going to judge us there's no uh overriding moral principle that's going to force us to do things therefore we can go out and kill all these orthodox priests and is johnstone notes in his book a lot of times there was they were put to the gun to the head and said hey will you deconvert no okay bam now that's hugely dangerous it is it's horrible so i wouldn't say that atheism is dangerous because of that because i feel like what we're doing is we're interpreting dangerous of atheism is that form of well here now here that's here's a thing now now we're separating on different forms if that's the case then you have to acknowledge that there are other motivators other aspects of tradition that are going into all different forms of Christianity how can you then say when the studies don't show it that Christianity is the cause of these things just because they're using it to justify because they say it's the cause they say they say all sorts of things is the cause yeah but if i mean i'm not here to to police how obtuse you're being like if if i think that it's it's inherently obvious to the audience that like if someone were to get up on stage and say you know i killed someone and this was my motive you believe them they're self-reporting their motive they're saying i've read this verse and it said to do this and i did it so then let me go back to the Pillsbury Doughboy example someone says the same thing will we therefore say Pillsbury Doughboy is dangerous i mean show me a case where people are interpreting the Pillsbury Doughboy to mean that and where they're doing it in mass and gathering in huge congregations and all coming to the same conclusion well we would say their mental health is what is dangerous they're using something to justify we need to clarify here between mental health and the person's own motivators versus what they use to justify motivators or what are actually causing the actions there i'm not willing to say that religion is a mental illness i feel like you're teetering on the edge there saying okay here's people who in mass you know hundreds of millions are coming to this conclusion well it's just their mental health how do you know it's just their mental health they're just mentally ill it's like no i don't i i have more respect for christians than that well first of all i'm not saying you're making that argument and you keep saying hundreds of millions i mean is there any research that shows hundreds of millions are taking verses from the bible to use them to do horrible things well i mean you can extrapolate statistics pretty easily so you can look at for example uh you know the the stat that i gave whereas 82 percent of of people in america believe in faith healing right yeah okay so of that you would you know most likely come to the conclusion that it's it's even higher among christians than among non-believers is that a fair a fair leap to say you know okay so if you say of that 82 percent that's you know there's what around 200 million believers in america i don't know the exact numbers off top of my head so if you know what's 85 percent of 200 million and are you gonna say you know now you have two billion christians and we've only looked at 10 of them you're already looking at numbers that are easily in the hundreds of millions just do that one extrapolation so it's not unreasonable to come to these numbers is what i'm saying so like they're not exact by your logic though if a christian does a bad thing that therefore is evidence of christianity causing the bad behavior or them using the justified i mean evidence that it's dangerous by that logic i mean the bible is going to say that because this is everyone's sins everyone does something bad if that's the standard i mean what again everything reduces to absurdity at this point no but it's not like for example if let's say that i go out and i murder someone in cold blood and someone says hey don't you know that you know the ten commandments it says don't kill like why did you do that and i said well i just didn't like his face okay well that's obviously not something that i'm pulling from the bible and the bible saying to do something different but if there's some horrible atrocity that i go out and i do or something that i do that puts myself at harm like let's say that i believe in faith healing and i go out and i give all my money away to a faith healer and i throw away my prescription or i throw away my grandma's prescription and she dies of cancer okay in that situation i've done something that's harmful i've done something dangerous maybe it wasn't malicious maybe i didn't have you know i wanted the best for my grandma and i just made a mistake because i didn't know better that's still dangerous and i'm still i'm drawing on verse after verse after verse after verse and it's not a one-off case like these are beliefs that are held at scale again the motivators from what the study show us do not actually show that the religiosity is the cause that's why i brought up the studies that figure out religious motivators versus traditionalism and other things but that's what this study shows is that belief that believes in form actions that you act upon your beliefs but people have multiple beliefs and this is why some studies will focus out on other aspects of beliefs that are most likely causing the behavior and and that's why you have multivariant analyses that will try to look and and take those out and they'll still find a strong connection because it's a non-linear connection but they still find a strong causal connection between is that the 79 country one yes again they actually say in there again their homo negativity does not define absolute version and again the other studies i noted necessarily necessarily yeah but again but again that's a leap in logic right there but it's also kind of irrelevant to the the overall point that's being made though what that like you you can find causal connections between belief and action they don't say causal connection there but you can do you can can when you're looking for causation causation is really tricky in social sciences because i mean in any science it's really hard to say something a hundred percent right that's not how science works science comes up with competing hypotheses and it tries to eliminate all of the possible ones until you're left with one it says this is the best answer that we have right now right that's how it works and that's the best that we've got so in in the case of this you say what are all the possible factors that can account for this and you also look at okay with this data line with this correlation how strong is the correlation what's the r-squared number how how much does it deviate from the mean and if you have like a really really really strong correlation and then you start factoring in all these other variables and you're like you know even with all of that taken into account there's still this undeniable connection here there's probably some linkage it might still be a third factor it might be something else that's why you know causation is is always very tricky to come about but when you have people themselves giving motive and saying this is why i do it and it fits the data that's a really strong case and again that's why i brought up additional studies and showed talked about their cultural artifacts and whatnot and again homo negativity it's not cultural artifacts into account with this yeah and again homo negativity doesn't mean prejudice according to their own stuff but again we're defining dangerous in different ways here you want to say that just because i mean by logic that chairs people in sitting in this room are dangerous the your shirt is dangerous because someone could take it off and strangle someone with it i mean this just reduces everything to absurdity and what we actually want to do is find out is what ideologies are actually going to be better for society what are actually going to do regress society what ideas are actually going to lead to horrible outcomes i mean if we're just going to say oh i found one case where christian did something bad and he used a verse to justify it therefore christian is dangerous but i mean what what is the standard here it's just at what at what point because i feel like as soon as you start doing a cost benefit analysis you've already admitted that there's danger and you've already conceded the debate now if you want to talk about the scale and cost benefit maybe it's better maybe it's worse okay i'm i'm happy to do that i'm happy to continue talking about that specifically but my question would be at that point where where do you draw the line in okay the numbers are big enough the death tolls big enough the number of people who have been ostracized and shunned and hurt and driven to suicide as i went over it was actual studies that would show that if you know if intrinsic religiosity was harmful and dangerous what do you mean by intrinsic religiosity intrinsic christian religiosity specifically christians it would be what intrinsic motivators so let me wait before you because i don't want to get lost in terminology so when you say intrinsic christianity intrinsic religiosity from christian backgrounds can you give a definition of intrinsic religiosity i did in the earlier slide here i can put it back up so intrinsic religiosity is when persons are disposed to use or persons find their massive motive in religion mat master motive in religion having embraced the creative individual endeavors to internalize it and follow it fully and that subject is a christian they'd be an intrinsic religious christian so but is love your neighbor intrinsically christian love thy neighbor is a command and when someone is intrinsically religious they draw from those kind of commands as their motivators that's the point not necessarily that's the point we have to get to and guys i do want to thank both holy cool and spire philosophy we are actually about to switch into the q and a we will let them have closing statements but i'm going to ask if you guys have any questions in the audience if you could start to make a line in the center for either or both of our interlocutors and i am going to just start off while people are getting in line we do have a question from one of our major sponsors of the event Dr. Sy Garp has sent the sponsor question from home he asks if christianity does pose a risk of danger how would you go about mitigating that risk nuclear power is highly controlled what would you suggest to control the risk of christianity what do you think about societies that play strict controls on christianity or other religions and thank you so much who is that directed at i believe that is directed at you because it seems that he's asking if christianity does pose a risk how are you going to mitigate that risk yeah i mean obviously i i'm a firm believer in a free and open society with freedom of religion freedom of expression so i think that the way to go about doing it would be to educate people of the dangers and of the risk which is what i do on my channel on holy kool-aid regularly and when i see that it happens regularly i talk about it we need to not be afraid to talk about these discussions no topic should be so sacred that we can't take it and it and shine some light on it and look a little bit deeper and so that would be the first thing would be just to to look at it examine it talk about it at that scale so people can say what's the harm that's being done and what can we do about it engage in the conversation both online and in person would be the first step all right thank you so very much and with that we're going to switch into our normal q&a oh it unplugged yeah the mic just unplugged dang it james you might have to hunch to talk into the mic and with that the floor is all yours for the second question okay yeah um question kind of for both of you because i found it odd that it wasn't to the end you asked him for definition of intrinsic religiosity when that kind of seemed to be his whole case was on those distinctions but um and so maybe this this might help kind of open any question to both of you you know it used to be said that uh playing violent video games led to violence or something like that and what they ended up finding what it was more along the lines of correlation like you said there's it's kind of weird correlation seem to be more that people who had a tendency to be violent were just attracted to playing violent video games is there any kind of study like that year that you've seen that people who are more violent tend to be christian or anything of that nature that would revolve around that type of correlation yeah like i talked about one of them with the meta analysis where it showed that while there does seem to be a decline in violence connected to religiosity when you take a third factor into account which is you know arousal levels then that that factor tends to disappear in the the data so like there are times all you know all throughout the social sciences where you'll have an external factor that um is what's to account for and that there is no causal connection um but the reason that i waited to tell the end with the intrinsic religiosity you know you brought it up at the very end and i wanted to i wanted to go a little bit deeper with it but we'll have to at another time i think so i'm not aware of any studies that show that so this this question is for uh holy koolaid um my question is kind of like the first question is related but goes a little a little deeper than that so from the outset of this debate i was kind of confused as to what your impact is because i i kind of you know because dangerous was defined so forgive me but nebulously um i felt myself kind of asking okay usually like for example if this was a debate about climate change or something and you were saying hey climate change is a real thing you would be advocating that we stop using fossil fuels and you know stop using plastics etc etc so what is the impact here like well like if you're saying like as we showed through the as was shown through the debate that like basically what you were saying was if something can be taken and used to justify something bad potentially uh then we should regulate it and and do all this stuff i was wondering like like how dangerous are you saying christianity and how far do we take this policing and regulating what is it exactly what exactly is your call to action that's a really good question i think my goal with this debate because if real quick show of hands if people feel comfortable how many people in here identify as religious so a good a good chunk of the audience um now my my goal here is and i know that this this is going to go out online as well is i have been living in the south now for a while and i had uh my parents were missionaries my parents were you know and i was very very religious myself you know all growing up and i know that oftentimes christianity just gets a pass or religion in general gets a pass where there can be horrible things that are swept under the rug and people will look the other way a great example of this is the child sex abuse scandals in the catholic church and it's not just the catholic church now they're starting to see it in another denomination after denomination after denomination and i don't think that we should have any sacred cows i think that everything should be analyzed in question and so the goal with this debate is not to necessarily say hey we christianity is dangerous in this specific way we have to do you know enact this legislation or whatever i just want people to become a little bit more open to that to realize that maybe there are things that need to be done maybe there are actions that need to be taken or maybe there's certain beliefs that should be left in the the dumpster pile of history and i'm not saying your entire religion i'm not saying you know which beliefs but i'm saying that because there are some dangers we need to be cognizant of it so i guess raising awareness okay well first of all i mean what i kind of got is that anything can be dangerous to stupid people you know i'm saying and second of all uh you know i just noticed that your only argument was fake healing and then you talk about the catholic church but if you just jesus said to just follow these teachings right so how jesus teaching is uh dangerous if you read the word of god and stick to the word of god stick to the bible how's it dangerous well i mean it depends because obviously jesus has a lot of different teachings right there's a lot of interpretations of them one example that i'll give you is when it comes to you know sex and sexuality right one major issue that we have especially right here in the state in the state of texas is that we do not have good science based um sex education in schools we do not have the at the level that we need and so if we could get comprehensive sex ed in schools you would see a reduction in teen pregnancy a reduction in abortion a reduction in stis these are all things that we all want like whether you're christian or atheist you want these things right and yet people don't want to talk about it they don't want to talk about sexuality part of that comes back to the teachings of jesus talking about you know sex and sexuality so so he he takes it he takes it from you know where you have an in the old testament you have all these commands about you know uh having you know sex committing adultery homosexuality etc and he takes it to a whole new level and all of a sudden there's shame simply around thought crime you look at a woman lustfully you've committed adultery with her in your heart he's upped the the the stage to to a whole new level that is i don't believe that thought crime should be a crime i'm glad i was able to make the debate out there was a barn burn next door just really great um but uh my bar burning a barn burn oh barn burn it's an analogy texas oh okay um but my only i thought god tried to smite me and mess i guess the question was uh when i became an atheist uh it wasn't so much a question of when i started going through different uh religions um allowed them the kind of the key was if i if i stayed right well it was no really consequences but the only thing i did see with christianity is i know if you guys is isn't it still dangerous not to believe in christianity if by your belief if it's dangerous to not believe in christianity good question i mean that that is a very complicated thing and i would say not necessarily because again you can be a good muslim you can be a good atheist that doesn't mean you're going to be a danger to society and i think this gets back to our understanding of what dangerous means most of the people in this room we would not say are dangerous even though they may have done bad things uh may have said weird things may have caused harm to other people but we would not conclude from that you're dangerous because you have done uh bad things so no i would not say because there's a difference between something being true and something being helpful for example uh tallameic astronomy is very helpful for navigation it was for as many years it wasn't dangerous but it was incorrect so you can have an incorrect worldview and still not be dangerous so that's a very important point here uh we would not conclude anyone here like yourself if you're an atheist is dangerous just because you may have done bad things or you're not a christian that's not what dangerous means if the standard of judging something is the level of danger if something is somebody is misapplying it then everything is dangerous i suggested the ratio between goodness versus evil of what comes from it is a better judgment better method of judgment if you apply that racial method then i think Christianity is the greatest thing that ever happened to humankind when you think that looking at Christianity only to the danger it can promote uh then you are applying a single variable solution to multi-variable problem oh that's a good question i think that the goal of this debate both for for myself and while i'm not sure about for michael i can't speak for you um because the topic of the debate was is Christianity dangerous and because so many people who i encounter will look the other way altogether i'm stressing that we have to accept that there are dangers now i'm not willing to grant that the good outweighs the bad i i've barely scratched the surface with obviously i ran out of time you know in showing some of the harm this caused and and i can tie them back to bible verses now you could say that those aren't caused by the religion you could say that those are misinterpretations of it or you could say that there's tons of great things that are done because of it as well and i'm happy to take a look at that too but i think that once you start to get to the point where you're you're not willing to look at the the bad at all that's a really dangerous place to be so if we can be a little bit more open to you know looking at the danger and looking at the harm and and understanding it and accepting it and seeing why it happens then it's like okay not then we can start doing a cost benefit analysis and seeing you know does the harm outweigh the good now here's the the number one area and i don't want to take too long on this answer but the number one area where i think i would push back on you is that it's not just that christianity is a collection of ideas if that was the case i'd be like it's just like you know with play-doh Aristotle you know any kind of philosophy like you can take the good ideas and discard the bad where i think that the danger really comes into play is that people see the entirety of it as divinely inspired it's take it all or lose it all right and so like i as an atheist i can say you know is love your neighbor a good idea yes i i agree it's a great teaching you know and i i can look through you know other verses and i agree and i can also look at the bad ones and discard them so if i can get more people to kind of come to that type of a situation where they can take the good and be willing to not hold on to the bad and not say that it's all sacred and it all has to be accepted i think that that's a better approach if you're getting the point we'll create a thing i just don't let everybody get it and this is the final one we can do it has to be you can always come talk to us after we're here and he can take questions too not just no no you got this you're good well for me i guess you know when it comes down to like why is you know why would christianity be considered dangerous you know because for me and my experience with christians and like i think yours was too you know growing up as a missionary uh most christians are good i mean obviously like you got the catholic church you know there's there's bad people within a good organization so i guess my question is there's a few bad apples spoiled the whole bunch in your opinion because there's a few bad christians do you think the entire christian religion is dangerous i think that christianity is a very powerful motivator it's it creates a setting that can potentially be cult-like and i want to make a distinction i'm not saying all all religion is cults but it's it creates a setting where you're taught to accept something oftentimes dogmatically not always and you're taught that this is sacred and in its entirety sacred and so it that's that's a very very dangerous dangerous setting what was the the the wording of the question again and i agree you know they call it sacred and you know it has been you know adulterated by man but i guess what i'm saying is in general christianity i think is good and i think i'm not trying to call you disingenuous but i think even you would admit that majority of christians are good that there's only hey let's go to this question man that there's only i guess my question is that you know you're saying christians bad and i know there is the catholic church and there are a lot of examples of cult like christianity but i would say the majority the majority over 50 percent are good yeah and and that that was you know thank you for for the refresher but i think that most people in general are good people i i don't think that most people are serial killers or else we'd have a lot higher murder rates i think most people are good people i think most christians are good christians i think most atheists are good good atheists the problem is that because religion makes us susceptible to doing things that we wouldn't otherwise do then it's it's like the quote i believe by steven weinberg that says without religion you'd have good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things for good people to do bad things they wouldn't otherwise do it takes religion both inspiring philosophy and holy cool eight for joining us at dubbado con 2022 and i am now thanks so much that was a fantastic rigorous debate we have closing statements we are now going to hand it to their closing statements sit down we right back to a holy cool eight for their up to five minute closing response as i stated in my intro the topic of debate of the debate today is not is religion beneficial it's not is christianity beneficial it's not weighing a cost benefit analysis the topic of the debate today is simply is christianity dangerous in order to to determine that i defined christianity christianity is a broad tapestry that includes over two billion people on planet earth christianity is the people now i don't have to speak christianese to convince people of that but i could i could say that it's a relationship not a religion and relationships are about the people and i could go on but i think we would all agree that when you when you have an inclusive definition you have a large number of people who are all taking this book to be their sacred holy book beliefs and form actions i demonstrated that with with this peer reviewed meta analysis showing that our beliefs inform our actions beliefs that are ingrained in us deeply ingrained deeply held that are regularly repeated and and heard and and reinstated we're more likely to act on than ones that that aren't the church is uniquely positioned to do this in a way that i can't think of anything else that does it quite like that so we have beliefs that are strong that are powerful that were told are divine and sacred you have your motive you have people admitting to their motive you have people linking it back and tying it back and you have harm that is being done at scale now i'm not saying that all christians are bad people i'm not saying that you know it's it's more bad than good i'm not saying any of that i'm simply saying we have to be cognizant of the dangers we have to be more careful and we have to examine it and say are there better alternatives can we take the good while discounting the bad i say yes because i say accepting the bad along with the good sure i'm not throwing the baby out with the bath water but let's not drink the bath water i can just eat the baby but that's probably that's a bad analogy i think that we can accept the good that's in christianity while throwing out the bad and if we're not willing to throw out the bad if we're not even willing to admit that there are dangers present then we have a problem i've demonstrated the problem i've demonstrated the dangers i've demonstrated the connection between the two and i've shown that there is harm using the risk assessment scale that's used by the government of the united states that's used by other governments including the the government of canada and i've shown that every single metric along that path that christianity fits it like a hand in a glove is christianity dangerous you damn well better believe it is now what are we going to do about it for your closing statement and with that we are going to hand it over to inspiring philosophy for the closing statement well thank you thomas i think it was a great conversation thank you all for coming out and thank you modern day debate let's start with the story you go to yellowstone there is a place called sour lake they have fenced it off because it's dangerous if you go in you will die okay you know what's right by it is that there was a walk path made of wood there are no signs saying the walk path is dangerous because you could trip and hit yourself so if christianity was really dangerous we would try to mitigate it control it contain it get rid of it we would advocate for change or what not i think the problem here is we're confusing real danger with potential danger the debate is not is christianity potentially dangerous the debate is if christianity is dangerous and so far we've seen no good strong evidence that anything bad is coming from christianity when we start looking into the data and the science again anything is potentially dangerous i feel like we're having two different debates here up there i'm trying to show what the actual data shows currently in reality it does not lead to the idea christian religiosity is dangerous in fact it shows the opposite it's actually quite beneficial uh just because there was a potential danger there for something that doesn't mean it is necessarily dangerous that doesn't mean it is dangerous we need to be very careful here see the difference between potential danger and actual danger and if there was really danger we would be we'd see more atheists advocating for things like control of christianity trying to get rid of it now that may not be the best thing because i do see no i think i do see some atheists actually trying to do that but again atheists also are pretty clear they want to go on what the science says and the science is pretty clear that if you want to get rid of things like christian nationalism right-wing authoritarianism get them get christians to be more religious as i showed in the studies get them to focus more on what they actually believe and get to the core tenets of their faith because that shows that actually makes them a better person get them away from making politics their god so to speak uh that kind of idea so if you want a better world you should actually be encouraging christians to go to church more to uh be more involved to actually believe what they preach and not use christianity as religious symbolism to promote some sort of political ideology yet we cannot confuse a potential danger with what is actually dangerous a real danger is something like sourlake or it's like walking on to a geyser uh these chairs are not dangerous all of you humans in here are not dangerous just because you may have done bad things that doesn't make you dangerous you're as potential for you to do bad things in the future i will not conclude you're all dangerous i would conclude there is potential there sure but again the debate is on if it is dangerous not if it is potentially dangerous with that i like to conclude oh thank you thank you all for coming thank you thomas this was fun thanks