No, YOU Shut Up! - Introduction

For some time now, an old high school chum of mine, Justin McRoberts (see photo to the right), and I have been discussing having a debate between our two blogs. I figured that this was a good idea because 1) I like debating, and 2) as a fairly successful recording artist, his blog no doubt gets more hits than mine – this will surely draw more traffic to my ramblings.

There was much discussion as to what we were going to debate. Originally, it was going to be a series called: “Who’s better? Grover Cleveland or Calvin Coolidge?” Then we changed it to: “Best band ever: The Troggs or Bananarama?” Ultimately, we decided on: “Butter: Many uses or just a few?”

Then Justin pointed out something to me. See, he believes in this thing he likes to call a “Gawd”. To be more specific, he believes in one called “DA JEEBUS.” (Other Gawds include "Juice", "Al Ahhhhh", and "Ganesha".) Apparently this “DA JEEBUS” was some crazy harry hippy who said a lot of stuff about some things and then got stuck in a tree or something. “Interesting,” I said to him. “Tell me more about this guy.” When he finished telling me the story, I told him that his story was stupid and he was a stupid person for saying it. “Nuh uh” he said, and then we proceeded to the most brutal, bloody, painful bout of fisticuffs in the history of pugilism.

Afterwards, we decided to debate this “DA JEEBUS” who happens to actually be called “Jesus” and was the “Christ”. The bottom line is this: he believes it; I don’t. I think that believing it is bad for people. No, not bad like shooting up black tar heroin five times a day, but maybe bad like shooting up regular heroin once a day.

In all seriousness, this will be a debate on religion. I’m an atheist, and he’s a Christian. I’m looking forward to this because I think that Justin is actually a thoughtful guy, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I thought the same thing about all Christians (or even most of them – sorry, just being honest, but then again I think people in general aren’t very thoughtful). This isn’t going to head into ridiculous territory like whether evolution happened or not , and I don’t expect him to say things like “Hitler was an atheist; therefore, you are like Hitler!” In other words, he’s not some young-Earth creationist, and he isn’t some homophobic “God hates fags!” schmuck either. In fact, he has some unconventional ideas about his religion, so I have to be on my guard to not assume that he believes the usual stuff that I hear from Christians. Plus, with most of the stuff he devotes himself to (charitable works and all that) I’d have to be a real jerk to find fault with it. Anyway, I just think that he could do all of that good stuff without the supernatural inspiration is all.

To start this off, we agreed that we’d try to stick with one topic at a time where one of us asks a question and then the other responds. He already got the ball rolling with this post here. Hopefully I can get around to writing my response within the next day or two.

Oh, and I should probably note that Justin suggested that we refer to this as a "conversation" rather than a debate. I think that this is a good idea, but I know his real reason for suggesting this. He's chicken.

One last thing - I also plan on posting at Alexandria, so you might find even more interesting commentary/comments there.