Intelligence Squared: Hitchens vs. Catholics
By Daniel Miessler on November 15th, 2009: Tagged as Religion
I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’ve not started watching Intelligence Squared you’re doing yourself a disservice.
It’s Oxford-style debate, and the way it works is you have a proposition, such as: “Catholicism is good for the world”, and you have two people arguing on each side. Here’s how it plays out:
- Poll the audience (for, against, undecided)
- Opening arguments
- Questions from the audience
- Back and forth between the representatives of each side
- Closing arguments
- Poll the audience again to see how opinion has changed
The great thing about the series is that you have an audience that gets polled prior to the arguments starting, and then gets asked again their opinion after hearing the debate. I think it’s by far the best way to quickly get up to speed on a particular topic. Or, to put it another way, if your position has a problem with it, you’re likely to hear the counter in this format.
NPR also has their own version which is excellent as well, called NPR Intelligence Squared.
Anyway, the video shown above is of Hitchens eviscerating the Catholics. It’s quite compelling, and his efforts yielded one of the highest movements of the audience in the history of the program. ::
