In reference to Lynn’s post just below, can you all let us know about any other religious and/or Christian blogs that host (mostly) civil discussion when when dealing with divisive issues, including ones that are welcoming to the non-Christian commenter?  Also, do you know about any blogs run by non-Christian groups that are engaging and welcoming to Christians?  You get the idea.  We’d like to know what else is out there, and you all seem very well-informed.

The most-watched videos on YouTube are mostly wordless clips like “The Evolution of Dance” (top of the list at 62 million hits), where viewers don’t really comment - they just watch and enjoy and move on.  Yet, the most-discussed videos on YouTube, where people make lots of long comments, like those here at WMB, tend to be the videos about politics and religion.  This article discusses some of the YouTube videos that have generated the most comment, and it’s an interesting read.

Got a question you’re just dying to ask the Republican presidential candidates? Well now you can, and it might just be broadcast and answered live during the CNN/YouTube debate on Nov. 28. You can submit it here, but don’t forget to share it with us, too.

Lots of folks have been ripping on Ann Coulter for her gunslinging remarks on TV of late (here’s a typical reaction), where she apparently comes out as intolerant and anti-Semitic.  I have to say, Coulter’s an easy target.  She’s weird to a lot of people.  She’s like the conservative at the party who makes the liberal fiery mad, because she’s having a laugh and he’s trying to change the world.  She’s not well-mannered like Laura Bush.  She doesn’t really try to make friends, it seems, even with people who might one day agree with her.  Nevertheless, the real controversy of her comments seemed to be her admission that a perfect America would be an America (and presumably a world) of Christians.  This is not news, given the fact that Christian churches have been sending out missionaries since there were such things as Christians and churches. 

All people believe that What They Believe is What Everyone Should Believe.  Not every nook and cranny of their worldview, but at least the basics.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that the Donny Deutsches of the world believe in basic ideas like Tolerance, Moral and Cultural Relativism, Democracy, Progress, etc., whatever those things mean to them.  And in Donny Deutsch’s perfect world, I think, he’d want everyone to share those basic presuppositions.  He might not want everyone to dress like him or eat like him or dance like him, but he would have to admit that he’d want his ideals to be the ideals.  Heck, that’s why anyone shares his opinion out in the world: he believes his ideals are right.

So, I think it’s safe to say that Coulter was only admitting this: she believes the presuppositions of Christianity are right, and in a perfect America, those would be the ideals of everyone.  But concepts like “an America of Christians” just scare people.  The end result is that Coulter comes off like a zealous young student of Protestant theology who might believe the right thing, but just can’t say it quite right.

While we’re on the subject of debates (ala Hitchens and D’Souza, see below), here’s one between a “Christian” and A.J. Jacobs, the self-described agnostic, unpracticing Jew who wrote The Year of Living Biblically, where Jacobs attempts to follow every rule in the Bible.  Despite the ignorance and know-nothing attitude of the book’s central premise (a premise shared by so many ignorant and know-nothing Christians, I might add), the debate starts with a few nice thoughts.  The “Christian,” Matt Labash, writes to Jacobs:

At first glance, I thought yours was going to be nothing but a jokey book-a one-note immersion-journalism stunt in which you pin the tail on the fundies and Orthodox Jews, showing the absurdity of the Bible by acting out its strangest parts […] But you get well past the weirdness, too. At heart, this is a seeker’s book, a doubter’s odyssey. Like most of the best books of the Bible, such as Job and my absolute favorite (and yours), Ecclesiastes, it’s a book about an athletic contest: trying to wrestle God to the ground. Agnostics and atheists tend to think that believers never doubt, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Even Jesus doubted God at Gethsemane, and, according to Christian theology, He is God. If Jesus can doubt Himself, I’m not going to beat myself up for doing the same on occasion.

That’s a nice, fresh way to begin a debate with an agnostic.  Think of it like the Hitchens-Wilson debate with a greater dose of satire. 

Next week, The King’s College is hosting a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza, whose new book, What’s So Great About Christianity?is out this week.  Hitchens is doing a lot of these debates, and it’s promising to see something like the rebirth of the Lyceum around the United States.  I like the idea of anyone traveling around debating things with people: it evidences an ability to discuss ideas in public, an appetite for it in the culture, a belief that there’s a thing called Truth that’s hard to get at but still there.  In short, there’s a lot of good coming out of Hitchens’s road show this past year. 

Some enterprising young seminary or PhD student ought to catalog and chronicle the debates into book form: like the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  It’d make a good contemporary primer for the atheist argument and the theistic answer.  The arguments are not new, but the fervor is.

D’Souza writes today in the Christian Science Monitor about one fundamental atheistic argument and its counter by Kant: namely, the argument that the material world is All That Exists and/or All We Can Know.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?

While Kant’s counterargument is murky and walks dangerously close to the precipice of agnosticism and postmodernism (those guys love Kant), he’s just saying what Believers have been saying for a far longer time: If material reality is all that exists, then what is love but chemicals, and what are you but a compost heap?