Debate: Is there an afterlife? - Hitchens and Harris vs. Rabbi's Wolpe and Artson

[The Vegan Marxist]

Reason I'm posting this, for 1) because it deals with science, but also because it's a question that, for the longest time, the religious once claimed to know the answer to. But now, as this debate shows us, and what both Hitchens and Harris cleverly push these two Rabbi's into admitting, the religious are now at a point where they no longer can adhere to such nonsense. They are forced to admit that they're losing the intellectual war between science and religion.

This debate was very well done, IMHO, and just comes to show why reason will always triumph in the long run:

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[Black Sheep]

new hitchens debate :scared::drool::drool::drool:

[The Vegan Marxist]

Yeah! Despite Hitchens' shitty bourgeois politics, he's one of the best atheist debaters that I've seen. He practically took both of the Rabbi's on himself. Harris didn't seem to say too much in this one.

[Salyut]

Yeah! Despite Hitchens' shitty bourgeois politics, he's one of the best atheist debaters that I've seen. He practically took both of the Rabbi's on himself. Harris didn't seem to say too much in this one.

Did you see this one? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx_ov2NiNo4)

[Black Sheep]

^
That's simply brutal

[hatzel]

Just because I like quoting myself across threads, here's something from a couple of threads about the afterlife, over there in the dark corners of the religion forum:


Last time I checked, we Jews hardly have anything to say about the world to come, the nature of the world to come, anything like that. The fact that there's a bit of a debate between those who think we go to heaven and those who think that we are reborn should be enough to suggest that we've hardly spent much time codifying the details of the afterlife. Which is precisely why we're a lot more about that 'hope for a better existence for ourselves and our offspring'. Remember the whole synthesis of the thing, when a big voice in the sky said 'if you take these mitzvot, everybody's gonna totally hate you guys forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, but the Messiah will eventually come from amongst your descendants and there'll be all peace and loveliness and stuff' (not a direct quote...it's a somewhat liberal translation from the Hebrew )...that alone suggests that the whole faith is based on the hope that great things will come to our offspring, and further delving into the faith should uncover countless examples of cases in which it is said 'it's good to do this, as it is to the benefit of your children'. Which is also why the Torah and the writings of the sages make little if any reference to the nature of the world to come, because we're not obsessed with all this talk of heaven that we'll never know anything about without going there, and if we've gone there, then we're not here. Therefore, everything about the nature of the afterlife (from a Jewish perspective) stands as mere speculation and conjecture by this or that rabbi throughout history, explaining how there can be such wildly differing speculations, such as the aforementioned distinction between heaven and rebirth. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to sit around complacent letting talk of the afterlife, of which I know nothing, affect my actions here on Earth!


Last thing I heard, when we die, we relive our current life, but as our soul, experiencing all the same stuff we do in our Earthly life, but from a totally different perspective. Therefore: welcome to heaven, chaps, albeit in a physical form!

The point being: debating the nature / existence of an afterlife with a pair of rabbis (who have quite enjoyed discussing it amongst themselves for a few thousand years, though I've yet to find anybody who has come to a definite conclusion, or considered it all that important :rolleyes:) might not be particularly comparable to debating it with a pair of bishops, for instance, for whom there is a very clear and seemingly unquestionable picture of the nature of the afterlife...my two cents :)

[∞]

Whats the point of death, whats it's significance? If there is life after???