On Thursday afternoon, The Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA hosted a debate between Sunsara Taylor and Scott Bartchy, my doctoral advisor. I was not able to make it to the debate, but was happy to find this tidbit giving what appears to be a fair report of the debate. The report is done by the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. Even giving their leanings, they seem to indicate that Bartchy had a much stronger point than Taylor.

Taylor’s argument was that all religion is bad. Bartchy’s point was that there is bad religion and good religion. I think Bartchy had an easier job to do because, well, he’s right. Both terrible things and great things have been done in the name of religion. Apparently Taylor shot herself in the foot when she defending communism by saying that there are good things and bad things in communism: “When Sunsara said that some things in Communist societies were good, some bad, Bartchy immediately compared it to his own point about good and bad religion.”

Of course there were people of faith who were dissatisfied with Bartchy as their representative in this debate. Apparently one woman refused to believe that Bartchy actually believes in God:

I didn’t catch the whole thing, but I heard her say, “So you don’t really believe in God”.  Bartchy insisted that she didn’t know that.  But she kept on saying “He doesn’t really believe in God”, walking away satisfied.

Bartchy often mentions that when people ask him about this, he often tries to ask them what they mean by “God.” Too often people have no idea how to articulate an understanding of what “God” means to them. For Bartchy, at least as he explains early Judaism and Christianity, their God is the God of “community forming power”: the God who gathers a people who are committed to following God’s way of social justice. When people talk about “God” in America, it is often something quite different.

Incidentally, it seems that Bartchy had the correct approach by responding in a reasoned and logical manner, in contrast to Bill O’Reilly who interviewed Sunsara Taylor and simply called her a “lunatic.”

Sounds like it was a stimulating event. Sorry I couldn’t make it.