My Appearance on Fundy Radio
Well, I followed the Friendly Atheist on fundamentalist radio’s Bob Enyart Live. The first half hour was live and then we recorded probably a weeks worth of material. I will post digital recordings of the shows when Bob’s producer e-mails them to me.
All in all, I thought that the live segment was the worst. It took me awhile to learn how to cut him off from tangents and redirect the conversation back on track. Bob’s style is to introduce an overload of information (much of it distorted and colored) to those who are unfamiliar with those particular cases. One of the things that I tried to do was to focus my part of the conversation toward the audience rather than debate Bob head on. This is hard to do because of his style of conversation. He tries to engage you in rapid fire debate, cutting to tangents and changing the subject before you can finish your point. In some cases it worked and in some cases I wouldn’t let him get away with it. He tries to use linguistically tricks and to use something you said out of context against you. He did that with Hemant too.
The important thing I had to keep reminding myself of is that there is an audience listening. So whenever he would talk about some Creationist argument that I was not familiar with, I would make a point to give out some scientific websites that deal directly with creationist arguments. I also made it a point to promote a few atheist books which I thought would help an inquisitive audience.
When I started talking about the Tower of Babel, I wanted to focus on how it was built to reach God. But I never got a chance to make that point.
One avenue I wish I could have gone into more would have been the beginnings of religion. I tried to do that toward the end in the last in interview, but we ran out of time. I was able to recommend Karen Armstrong’s book, “The History of God.” Evid3nc3 on YouTube does a great job summarizing this book in his latest video.
Over all, I am disappointed in my performance. I think I could have done better. But I am that type of person who is never happy with my performance even when people tell me I did a good job. In this case, I doubt I will hear that though. So I will consider this a learning experience and evolve accordingly.
My main problem in my opinion was that I allowed Bob to suck me into the mythology when I should have focused on the general ridiculousness of the mythology itself. Please share your thoughts and suggestions for the future. There are a lot of other topics that came up in the debate that I want to go into, but I’ll save that for another day.
Filed under: Creationism, debate, Religious Manipulation
