Dan Barker Debate - The Horrible Fiction Of The Old Testament - Part 1

Dan Barker Debate - The Horrible Fiction Of The Old Testament - Part 1

In this debate, Dan Barker argues about the horrific nature of the old testament.

Daniel Edwin Barker (born June 25, 1949) is an American atheist activist who served as an evangelical Christian preacher and musician for 19 years but left Christianity in 1984. He and his wife Annie Laurie Gaylor are the current co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has written numerous articles for Freethought Today, an American freethought newspaper. He is the author of several books including Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist.
Barker has been an invited speaker at Rock Beyond Belief. He is on the speakers bureau of the Secular Student Alliance.

[mtbikerlife]

Dan just speaking facts that we can understand automatically wins this debate. 3 minutes into the other guys speech he is all over the place with charts, talking fast, and jumping around from point to point with zero proof. He's a perfect Christian.

[fatterburrito]

If we're counting predictions the Simpsons should be up there as a holy show.

[captaingraybeard]

Let’s all just think about it for a minute. If any of the characters from the Bible were around today telling their stories wouldn’t they all be labeled schizophrenic and most likely locked up? I’m sure as hell I’d be locked up if I tried saying God told me to sacrifice my son.

[jacksquat]

We should not concern ourselves with a fictitious God of vile temperament, and voracious appetite for violence, but we ought to fear those who endeavor to follow him, march to his drums, and obey his commands.

[donnamuller]

I don’t know why I used to take this second guy’s opener as proof of anything. I did, though. It’s a jail of the mind. You want to know who saved ME? When the Internet was new and I was searching for Truth, Dan Barker himself was kind enough to enter into an email exchange with me. He answered all my questions, recommended books and barely-there websites, and was endlessly patient with me. Thank you, Dan! Since then, I’ve left the church, 2 years later my husband followed, our 6 children grew up as unbelievers, and they’ve established unbelieving households for my grandchildren.

[jonathanross]

Imagine for a moment that I released a book in 2010 that I supposedly wrote all the way back in 1995 and I claim that it contains dozens of prophetic revelations. So you're reading through the book and you notice that the prophecies about the years 1996, 97, and 98 are mostly accurate but they are fuzzy in a few places and contain some information that was thought to be true even just a few years ago, but we have since discovered it's not accurate. You find that kind of interesting so you keep reading.

You notice that the closer you get to the 2010 release date of the book, the more accurate and specific the prophecies become. The housing market crash in 08 is described in detail, including names of important people at the time, important dates and places, with very very few errors.

"Wow" you think. "Amazing!" You keep reading.. but suddenly all the prophecies about events occurring after 2010 are entirely unspecific. They are so vague they could be interpreted to mean any number of things. Gone are the dates, the names of people and places and their effect on history. The language is ambiguous and poetic. No longer do we see "predictions" like "Barack Obama shall be elected president on the promise of healthcare reform". Instead we see flowery language like "and the 3 great waves of the sea shall terrify the people and pillars of smoke and ash shall rise from lands to the east and west"

The only people who wouldn't see through the sharade are those who desperately wanted to believe I was a prophet. Everyone else would correctly surmise that I didn't write the book in 1990, I wrote it in 2010. My memory was a little fuzzy on events that took place 20 years earlier but I got the gist of it right. Events that had just taken place prior to 2010 were fresh in my memory, so details were clear and accurate. But since I have no prophetic abilities, I had to resort to vague, ambiguous predictions with no specific timelines for everything after 2010.

And that folks, is the book of Daniel.

[andrewlevy]

What I love about this dude is that he was a hardcore christian like I used to be. Finally he came to his senses.

[Carlibra]

I took the time to read the Old Testament when I was 18 and all the things Richard Dawkins says about it are true. It describes a God who is unbelievably horrific.

[BrendanWhelan]

Dan Barker: uses Science, Archeology, Logic and sound reasoning to show how the Bible is most likely myth and fiction.

Christian: uses the Bible to prove the Bible is fact.

Christianity in a nutshell.

Dan Barker is one of my favorites to do these debates. Him and Hitch, who is sorely missed.

[JesusGarcia-butf]

I love how believers resort to slide shows about the bible in order to prove god’s existence instead of just asking “hey god, can you help me out here?”

[ThrivingReality]

using the bible to prove the bible is not really proving anything...

[MrGrumblier]

Daniel 11 sounds more like a summary of the Game of Thrones than a prediction of the future. Of course, Daniel 11 was written around 164 BCE so it isn't all that amazing that it "predicts" events that happened well before it was written.

[DarrellOakdenPhotography]

I tried so hard to make any sense of what the Christian guy was trying to say. Unfortunately, it sounded like a torrent of word salad. Dan makes a much more coherent and logical argument.

[JamesRichardWiley]

Here we go:
Yahweh is a Hebrew tribal male god who always existed and knows all things.
He creates a male human out of dirt and a female human from the man's rib.
He assigns them free will and runs a test to see if they will disobey him, knowing that they will.
When they disobey him as he knew they would, he curses them and remains angry with them and their descendants for thousands of years.
Finally he relents by having a son by a virgin which he sacrifices over a weekend to remove the curse.
Later he rejoins himself in his heavenly kingdom - which is within you, according to his son.
Pure rubbish.

[dandrechesterfield]

my dog talks to me all the time, it always seems to be when my meds run out

[philipmullins]

The second person speaking reminds me of a person who reads a science fiction novel and believes everything in the novel is true .

[thedesigneer]

I will reward 1000 dollars to whoever understood what that Christian kid was babbling about.

[kevinodonnell]

It took me until I was 29 to finally break my yoke with Belief. I finally embrace Knowledge, not Belief.
Philosophy and The Sciences was my key to Freedom from Faith.

[Doriesep]

Why wouldn't common sense dictate that the thing was fiction? All the stories were mean, and the whole system with a god panting for blood to get paid back for his creatures naughtiness.

[shanen]

He may as well have just argued “the bible is true because the bible says so”