“Yahweh acts like a tribal war god” – Alex O’Connor & Dinesh D’Souza | Pangburn ▶️

I like Donald Akenson’s cheerful remark “I cannot believe that any sane person has ever liked Yahweh.” But as Akenson adds, that is irrelevant, since Yahweh is reality. 1 would go a touch further and identify Yahweh with Freud’s “reality-testing,” which is akin to the Lucretian sense of the way things are. […] Yahweh is the most persuasive representation of transcendent otherness that I have ever encountered. And yet Yahweh is not only “anthropomorphic” (a hopeless term!) but absolutely human, and not at all a pleasant fellow, but then why should he be? He is not running for office, questing after fame, or seeking benign treatment in the media. If Christianity insists that Jestis Christ is the good news (an assertion that brutality by Christians throughout history has invalidated), then Yahweh is bad news incarnate, and Kabbalah tells us he most certainly has a body, an enormous one at that. It is an awful thing to fall into the hands of the living Yahweh.

Harold Bloom
Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine

From the debate “Is The Bible True?”, held in the Bronx, NYC, between Alex O’Connor and Dinesh D’Souza on June 1st, 2024.

Atheist Alex O’Connor & Christian Dinesh D’Souza go head-to-head in an all-out intellectual brawl! The question? IS THE BIBLE TRUE?… Expect fireworks! This event took place on June 1st, 2024 in The Bronx, NYC at the Lovinger Theater at Lehman College.

When they ask you: “What is the purpose of life?” “Proof and conjecture, and keep the SF’s score low.” Now, the game with the SF [Supreme Fascist] is defined as follows: If you do something bad the SF gets at least two points. If you don’t do something good which you could have done, the SF gets at least one point. And if nothing — if you are okay, then no one gets any point. And the aim is to keep the SF’s score low.

Paul Erdős
Jewish-Hungarian mathematician

Alex J. O’Connor is founder of the “Cosmic Skeptic” YouTube channel, podcast and blog, platforms dedicated to the publication of philosophical ideas and debates in an accessible format. A recent graduate of philosophy and theology from St. John’s College, Oxford University, Alex is an international public speaker and debater, having delivered addresses across multiple continents at conferences, universities, and local drinking groups, as well as debated ethics, religion, and politics with a number of high-profile opponents before college audiences, on radio talk shows and on national television.

Dinesh Joseph D’Souza is an Indian-American right-wing political commentator, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. He has written over a dozen books, several of them New York Times best-sellers. Born in Mumbai, D’Souza moved to the United States as an exchange student and graduated from Dartmouth College.

THE FULL DEBATE: