{"id":3025,"date":"2009-10-20T08:27:31","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T16:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3025"},"modified":"2009-10-20T08:29:52","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T16:29:52","slug":"lions-and-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/lions-and-christians\/","title":{"rendered":"Lions and Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intelligence Squared is a privately-funded outfit staging debates in London. You can get\u00a0a sample of the kinds of topics they debate from their home page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Free-market capitalism is so 20th century<\/p>\n

The threat to our civil liberties from an overmighty state has been much exaggerated<\/p>\n

Everything a man does he does to get laid<\/p>\n

It is time to lift sanctions against Burma<\/p>\n

Atheism is the new fundamentalism<\/p>\n

\u2026\u00a0\u2026\u00a0\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pretty much anything, in fact.<\/p>\n

Well, yesterday they debated the motion:\u00a0 “The Catholic\u00a0Church is a force for good in the world<\/a>.” Speakers for the motion were John Onaiyekan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, and\u00a0Ann Widdecombe, a Tory Member of Parliament and Catholic convert. Speaking against were actor\/writer\/gadfly\u00a0Stephen Fry (Jeeves<\/a>,\u00a0General Melchett<\/a>) and, yes, Christopher Hitchens<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Onaiyekan and Widdecombe got their keisters kicked. Daily Telegraph<\/em> reporter Andrew Brown, a Catholic himself, tells the story\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Brown points out, the defeat of the motion was highly predictable. The two arguing against it were seasoned public performers, though of\u00a0different kinds. An archbishop and an MP are also public performers, but not of the kind with long and deep training in thinking on their feet.\u00a0(Members of Parliament are better at this than your average congresscritter, to be sure; but the House of Commons is not what it once was, and there\u00a0are plenty of dull drones in there.) As Brown says:<\/p>\n

The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed\u00a0by two hugely popular, professional performers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He goes on to wish\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026\u00a0that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and\u00a0prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure about Belloc, but I don’t think Chesterton was a very good speaker. He was a good writer<\/em>, but that’s a different skill set,\u00a0though a great many people seem not to know this. (Nabokov: “I think like a philosopher; I write like a great novelist; I speak like a\u00a0child”\u00a0\u2026 & of course Dr. Johnson’s observation<\/a> in the\u00a0Rambler<\/em>.) Someone in the comment thread suggests Robert George, whom I have never seen in debate. I have<\/em> seen Michael Novak, debating with\u00a0Heather Mac Donald. I’d been told by Catholic friends that Novak was one of their best minds. Perhaps he is, but he was a poor debater on that occasion. \u00a0Sample: \u00a0On the\u00a0point about\u00a0religious societies being better behaved than irreligious ones, Heather asked “What about Japan? They’re irreligious, but it’s a very orderly\u00a0place.”\u00a0 Novak: “Oh, I think the Japanese are very<\/em> religious\u00a0\u2026”\u00a0 Uh-huh. (On another occasion, in an exchange on NRO, I asked Novak how there could be any evidence for a human female having been impregnated by an invisible spirit. \u00a0He, apparently trying for mockery: “John Derbyshire does not believe the Mother of God.” \u00a0Uh ……. huh.)<\/p>\n

In any case, Brown’s account of the event left me feeling more sympathetic to the defenders of the motion than the subject matter would have led me to predict. The\u00a0mismatch of presentation skills is so big, I wonder if there wasn’t an element of set-up about it, though even if there was, I suppose the defenders have only themselves\u00a0to blame for accepting the deal.<\/p>\n

The reason this caught my attention is that I’ve been doing some public speaking myself recently. I’m pretty hopeless at it; but of course when\u00a0your publisher tells you to go out and do X, Y, and Z to promote your book, you go and do them. I’ll draw the line somewhere this side of going over\u00a0Niagara Falls in a barrel\u00a0\u2026 but not very far this side.<\/p>\n

There’s a sample coming up on TV this Sunday, a televised event<\/a> where I\u00a0do Q&A on my book with Alan Colmes. It was terrifically decent of Alan to do the thing. It paid nothing, and he had to come all the way out from\u00a0Manhattan to Long Island in the rush hour for it. He’s really a very good guy. \u00a0Still, sitting down for the Q&A, the thought going through my head was something like: “OK, here’s Alan, seasoned TV performer\/debater\/defender-of-his-faith (i.e. multi-culti liberalism), and here’s me, a\u00a0retired and uncourtly scholar, dragged blinking from his garret into the daylight. This will be lions & Christians\u00a0\u2026”\u00a0 Friends who were\u00a0present tell me I didn’t do too badly, but of course, driving home, I thought of all the points I should<\/em> have made if only I’d been quick-thinking enough. I guess Abp. Onaiyekan\u00a0and the Right Hon. Ms. Widdecombe were similarly afflicted last night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intelligence Squared is a privately-funded outfit staging debates in London. You can get\u00a0a sample of the kinds of topics they debate from their home page. Free-market capitalism is so 20th century The threat to our civil liberties from an overmighty … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3025"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3032,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions\/3032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}