Did you miss those famous debates two years back between Chris Hedges and Sam Harris on one night and Christopher Hitchens the next night? I’m pretty sure that most of the brite lights of the new atheism have participated in public debates.

2) To paraphrase a famous quote, your debating with Coyne might look good on your c.v., not so good on Coyne’s.

Oh come on, if Mooney was telling Coyne to shut up, fine, but then we’re all being told to shut up countless times during the course of a month.

Indeed, wasn’t Coyne telling Forrest and the NCSE to “shut up,” if we’re using this particular (loose) standard? Not altogether, of course, but to shut up about religion. Which is the closest Mooney came to telling anyone to “shut up.”

Or one could understand Coyne and Mooney to be making statements about what is preferable to say, and how to say it. This is done all of the time as well.

There may be specific objections to be made about what Mooney said (especially the title), but those would be better to focus upon, rather than turning this into an issue of someone supposedly saying “shut up.”

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/06/05/why-evolution-is-true-but-coyne-is-wrong-about-religion-part-ii-lessons-of-dover/

There really is a substantial issue here in the matter of accommodationism. I think that it deserves serious discussion in our community. And I’ll warn everybody that there’s a tricky spectrum of meaning arising from the vehemence of disagreement. The more forcefully one expresses disagreement, the easier it is for opponents to infer an attempt at censorship. All such inferences are incorrect, because nobody is in a position to censor anybody on the Internet. I can tell another person that their comment is so bad that it will lead to the extinction of all life on the planet, and that person will likely — and incorrectly — infer that I am suggesting that their comment should not have been made. So let’s just dump all this silliness about censorship and telling people to shut up. It’s ridiculous. So shut up about saying “shut up”!

Having read the book, I’d expect this side can do more than steroid addled posturing and bluffing. If it’s a formal debate on stage, though, which is an entertainment, you shouldn’t forget that. It’s not about settling a question, it’s about changing a margin who will vote for your position.