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The great debate

My university brings a lot of notable speakers to campus every year, although lately it seems that they’ve been lacking in the star-power department. I don’t usually bother to see speakers I’ve never heard of, so I haven’t been to many speaking engagements in a while.

But on Monday, I found out from an Alligator opinion column that Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza would be participating in a debate called “The Great Religion Debate” on Tuesday night. As soon as I read about it, I knew I had to go.

Okay, I hadn’t heard of Dinesh D’Souza, but I had heard of Christopher Hitchens. Maybe you’ve heard of his book, God Is Not Great. Just by the title, you can tell which side he was on. And maybe by the fact that I had heard of him.

On Tuesday evening, my friend Mark and I went to the debate. We were a little late because we had come from Free Culture‘s last meeting of the semester, but fortunately, some of Mark’s friends were saving seats for us. Needless to say, we were able to get tickets just fine, even though the place was pretty packed.

The moderator was a UF professor who asked extremely long questions and then gave each speaker a little bit of time to answer. I was familiar with some of the arguments they made for and against religion and gods’ existence. D’Souza was a relatively engaging speaker, which made him sound fairly convincing in spite of all the untruths and logical fallacies he trotted out.

Hitchens offered plenty of witty remarks, though, and some of his comments inspired applause from the audience. In one such remark, he characterized Vatican City as a fiefdom, carved out by an agreement with a fascist dictator, that was being used to shelter child-rapists from justice. Incidentally, my mental applause-o-meter indicated that more people agreed with him than with D’Souza.

The most interesting part was the Q-and-A session at the end. Most of the audience’s questions were pretty simple, and the debaters provided short answers. One guy, however, literally referred to Hitchens as Satan, provoking shouting and jeers from the rest of the audience. Bad memories suddenly came back to me, but things calmed down after a minute.

Blake, the president of Gator Freethought, asked each debater what it would take for him to switch to the other side. I believe Hitchens’ answer was “Rabbit bones in the Precambrian layer,” and D’Souza seemed to dodge the question.

During the debate, Hitchens mentioned that he and D’Souza had been discussing a certain topic over dinner beforehand, and they also mentioned how they would be debating at Notre Dame (where, I assume, D’Souza would be the audience’s favorite) the next day. I thought it was pretty interesting that two people who disagree on so many things could be touring together and debating night after night while still being able have dinner together. That’s professionalism.

For more quotes and a pretty picture, see the Alligator‘s article about the debate.

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