Debate Quotes - Page 2

The only truths worth arguing about are those truths that could prevent or lead to circumstances that may bite us in the rear sooner or later.

Instead of seeing how much pain I can dish out towards those I disagree with, or who I believe have done me wrong, I seek to follow the golden rule and use my words and behavior to create more of what the world needs – love, compassion, and connection.

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other care-givers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organised, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

In his early days at University, he'd been too green to realize winning debates, even private ones, would lose him friends.

I believe God himself will someday debate with and answer every objection arrogant men can come up with against him; I believe he will humble us and humor himself. Know-it-alls, pseudo-intellectuals, militant anti-theists, for Christ's sake, or rather their own sake, best beware of getting roasted by their own medicine. Ah! Our delusions of trying to argue against an omniscient Creator.

Naturally, I always place my word over anyone else's simply because I know why I said what I said.

Real life issues are not mathematical equations. We’re not calculators crunching numbers. We’re humans sorting through complex, multi-layered issues, and we’re doing so while enduring the (sometimes profound) personal effects of our conclusions. While we want to be reasonable, we are inexorably pulled in the direction of our oldest mental habits and by our deepest life-impacting needs. We’re repelled by those ideas which can jeopardize our comfort, safety, and happiness. We can try to be fair, but all the while we are fighting against our needs and fears. There are things we don’t want to be true (or false). Our lives are built on certain beliefs which, if disproved, could wreck us. These are the truths that we 'can’t handle'.

If we want to use a physical analogy, a more accurate one would show that many of our beliefs are like boulders pushed off from the top of a mountain. The boulder tips, and the thousands of contours of the mountainside, along with any trees (or lack thereof), its hardness, etc., react to the shape, size, and contours of the boulder itself. Rainfalls alter how much cushion the earth gives when the boulder slams into it and how much trees and shrubs will bend before breaking. All of these variables mix and, based on its bounces and rotations, the boulder lands in a very specific spot at the bottom. In many ways, this is how we form many of our beliefs—by countless, unique mental influences pushing us this way and that.

The Existential-Epistemic Spiral—MeaningOur central beliefs shape and guide us, but the staggering synergistic power of our dynamics working together creates an existential centripetal force at the core of our being—meaning. Nothing affects us like meaning. Meaning is everything, the cumulative effect of all dynamics spinning inside of us. It generates and sustains our identity, creates stability and purpose. It drives our choices, shapes our feelings, and guides our morality.

We all live within our belief solar systems; it’s how we make it through each day. What feels “real” and “true” is based on it. Internal consistency and function means that a belief solar system is simply livable, but it says nothing about its veracity.

Your patterns of thought, existing bodies of knowledge, beliefs, predispositions, etc. are the 'stuff of your mental universe'. We are always subject to the power of our mental inertia. The waves in our mental oceans can never be magically stilled, and are therefore always impacting our new beliefs, even when we become scrutinizing adults. It is simply impossible to 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. These effects remain with us throughout our entire lives. Even the beliefs that we later discard are difficult to completely negate, and leave their own residual effects.

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer.

When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Look, Aerin, preparation is only half the challenge of winning a debate.”“And the other half?”He had her now. “You have to choose the right side.”“Your side, you mean.” She bristled.“No, the losing side.”“What?”“Always choose the weaker side.”“Why would I do that?” Doubt edged her voice, but now she was sitting erect, her feet flat on the floor.“Because then you have further to go to prove your case.” He eased the feet of his chair down. “In a debate, there are two sides. If both make a good argument, then the less popular side wins because that side had further to go to prove its point. Simple logistics.”“If you don’t care which side wins.” She frowned.“It’s a debate. It doesn’t matter which side wins.”“You mean it doesn’t matter to you.” The tone in her voice unsettled him. Or maybe it was the fact that that her criticism disturbed him at all.“It’s a class,” he said. “The point is to flesh out the different sides of an argument.”“And you don’t care if the truth gets lost in the shuffle. Don’t you believe in anything?!

In projecting onto others their own moral sense, therapists sometimes make terrible errors. Child physical abusers are automatically labeled “impulsive," despite extensive evidence that they are not necessarily impulsive but more often make thinking errors that justify the assaults. Sexual and physical offenders who profess to be remorseful after they are caught are automatically assumed to be sincere. After all, the therapist would feel terrible if he or she did such a thing. It makes perfect sense that the offender would regret abusing a child. People routinely listen to their own moral sense and assume that others share it.Thus, those who are malevolent attack others as being malevolent, as engaging in dirty tricks, as being “in it for the money,“ and those who are well meaning assume others are too, and keep arguing logically, keep producing more studies, keep expecting an academic debate, all the time assuming that the issue at hand is the truth of the matter.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 p122

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.

You change society by changing the wind. Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political discussions are being made, and you will change the outcomes... You will be surprised at how fast the politicians adjust to the change in the wind.

Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.

As for the majority, it is not so much race as it is political affiliation that really divides it today. What was once an issue of physical difference is now one of intellectual difference. Men have yet to master disagreeing without flashing all their frustrations that come with it; the conservative will throw half-truths while the liberal will throw insults. Combine these and what do you get? A dishonest mockery of a country.

Meanings with no purpose are useful for meaningless debates on what the "meaner" meant. And that's what #politics is all about - misreading.

If people are not dancing to your tune, change the song.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Idolatry happens when you worship or praise anything excessively to the point of causing you to believe it reigns supreme. All things on this earth are temporal, even your very own desires. Be careful that you do not create idols to worship.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Practicing dialogue helps you to cultivate a realness that allows you to face reality on its own terms, not just the terms you’d like it to have in order to remain in your comfort zone.

I wish for you a more difficult life, somewhere in the complicated center, where the courage of your convictions blends with humility and respect for others.

Kenneth Patrick Ruscio

The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.

Does giving your piece of mind, bring a peace of mind? Or is it better to be silent and let the war inside subside?

Anthony Liccione

Don't fight to be right, but fight when you are right.

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same.

Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent."Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: "You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds."The young man directed his scowl in her direction. "I think human beings matter more than stones.

Agatha Christie

Engaging solely to validate your opinion takes away from the character building process.

He listened to their opinions, stated his own, and supported them with reasons; and from his being constantly occupied with such meditations, it resulted, that when in command no complication could ever present itself with which he was not prepared to deal.

Niccolò Machiavelli

...There are also those who inadvertently grant power to another man's words by continuously trying to spite him. If a man gets to the point where he can simply say, 'The sky is blue,' and people indignantly rush up trying to refute him saying, 'No, the sky is light blue,' then, whether they realize it or not, he has become an authority figure even to such adversaries.

Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment.

...civility doesn't require consensus or the suspension of criticism. It is simply the ability to disagree productively with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.

Ravi Iyer and Jonathan Haidt

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

William F. Buckley Jr.

The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

Robert A. Heinlein

The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A deep breath is a technique with which we minimize the number of instances where we say what we do not mean … or what we really think.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Whenever they are condemning weaves or breast implants, some people speak so passionately that their false teeth almost fall out.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

...Society needs to open its collective mind to all ideas and ideologies. It needs to give its people the chance to listen to the opinions of others, and then examine them critically instead of rejecting them prematurely. Such a creative dialogue based on positive critical thinking can enhance and develop ideas.

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn’t make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn’s but trust me the illusion is worse.

So why don't they face us... examine our evidence, debate, talk... act like real historians instead of thought-police? Why shut us out of the media, pass laws against our speaking, persecute us, sue us, and vilify us?

Randolph D. Calverhall

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.

Christopher Hitchens

The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.

Christopher Hitchens

The love of conflict is most evident when opposing forces join sides to defeat the peacemaker.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Joe Abercrombie

Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

Bangambiki Habyarimana

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

Bangambiki Habyarimana

I know what is going on in the heart of an atheist. Deep anguish that there is nothing beyond, nothing to live for, nothing to give him hope. I know because I endured the same predicament.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

After losing faith, even an atheist feels a yawning void in his soul that needs filling; there is nothing imaginable that he can fill with it. It was all along meant to be filled with the sacred, with the unknown and unknowable power. That's the curse or blessing of humanity

Bangambiki Habyarimana

All religions are guesswork

Bangambiki Habyarimana

My gut instinct is that these heavens and hells exist nowhere else except in our hearts and minds

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Don’t curse the gods you will feel shame when you have to call on them for help

Bangambiki Habyarimana

God is powerful. Even those who claim not to believe in him fear him. Though their mouths may confess to disbelieve in him, their hearts yearn for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

He is an atheist anyone who does not believe in my god and the wrath of god is upon him; I am in my right to meet that wrath on him," thunders the fanatic

Bangambiki Habyarimana

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