Getting Shapiro to admit that morality does not come from God is a big W and he's getting dragged for it elsewhere. Bravo cheerio here here

If God can tell this people not to eat shellfish, then he can tell people to not own slaves

Alex, you can't on the one hand call slavery immoral and on the other hand own Ben like that

That last argument about the wife of the slave and their children completely ANNIHILATED Ben’s position. That was brilliant.

Alex: You believe that there are moral absolutes and they come from the bible. Ben: Yes. Alex: The bible allows moral wrongs like slavery. Ben: Well it wasn't immoral back then. What a debate master.

holy shit ben's not debating a student

The virgins they were permitted to keep as slaves were often just children, little girls, absolutely indefensible. No amount of speed-talking apologetics can dig Ben out of this one.

Ben: well God was cool with slavery back then because it was normal Also Ben: gay marriage is bad still because the bible said its bad then

I'm not great at keeping score, but seems to me Alex got Ben to: 1. State that God is not always moral. 2. Agree we do not get our morality from scripture. 3. Concede there are things God cannot do. 4. Admit there are moral & logical contradictions throughout the Bible.

Ben "I'm not God. I can't speak for God. I don't know why God does these things." Also Ben "Let me speak for God."

I think Alex's point is that all these laws look suspiciously not like God was adjusting his laws for man. But rather that some man was pretending that these laws came from God.

Alex - you're quick on your feet, calm, focussed and erudite. Hats off for your polite respectful interviewing technique, and for keeping a clear head under pressure.

It's so fun to watch Ben, who hates being wrong, forced to choose to be wrong by a belief system.

Slavery in the Bible is completely indefensible. People who will defend indefensible things have no right to be taken seriously

I’m glad we’re in unanimous agreement that Ben lost.

Is this a podcast or a blind date? That ambience damnnn

Usually, Ben can hide the fact that he doesn't have an answer pretty well. But not this time

You can tell Ben isn’t used to debating people with a strong academic knowledge of the Bible

Ben's saying that God couldn't outright denounce slavery because it was very common at the time, but why was it then able to outright forbid adultery ("Thou shalt not commit adultery") which was probably equally common? Funnily enough, modern societies abolished slavery but not adultery despite Ben saying that present day morals are rooted in religion by which logic adultery should be illegal.

These debates where people can remain respectful while arguing their points is a breath of fresh air from all the extreme political divisiveness these days. Whatever side of the fence you’re on there is a lot that can be taken away from this debate.

"the bible is talking for the people of a particular time" so what's the point of following what it says now

I give Ben credit for agreeing to this discussion. It was really satisfying to see him fully exposed and squirming.

Jesus Christ! Ben was violated at around 9:30. His own statements came back like a missile and hit him. This Alex guy is just awesome. A new subscriber from India here.

Interesting to look at through a merely social/cultural lens rather than that the redemptive reality/principle being shown in the ownership/freeing of slaves.

Getting Ben to admit he is a moral relativist is quite a feat

Ben on the back foot, forced to say slavery is immoral, and also forced to defend it in the Bible. Yet cannot concede any of this is contradictory otherwise his worldview starts crumbling. Mental gymnastics to make Olympians sweat

love the silent listener in the conversation😂

I enjoyed the respect given to each of the debaters. It always amazes me how religion must twist itself in every situation to explain some conflict in the scriptures. If an all knowing God wanted us to know a thing, why does it take centuries of study and debate and schools and institutions to try and figure out the real meaning?

Alex O'Connor DESTROYS Ben Shapiro with LOGIC and FACTS 🤣

"god had to be practical to woe people away from slavery" The guy is all knowing and all powerful. He'd know exactly how to convince those people that slavery should be abolished

Thank you for this interesting and respectful conversation. I’m not a religious person. I ran away from “catechism” (religion lessons) when I was only 8 and never came back again. But I’m very interested in religions since I was a child because they shaped societies and power along millenia. There are a few simple analytical concepts / ideas that I always use to analyze and evaluate the reasonableness and fairness (not the positivista logic) of any religion: 1 - Faith / belief is diferent from religion. Religions are human constructions made at the image of the men who created them in a certain time, in a certain context. To be a relious person (follow a religion) is a rational individual choice (ignoring here the forced conversion that rarely is completely spontaneous). People choose the values and patterns of behaviour they want to follow (ignoring here the propaganda and sheep effect). To believe / to have faith is an irrational inner impulse, even when we may find rational arguments to believe. In some cases faith and religion coincide and mix in a way that makes difficult to say where one begins and the other ends. 2 - Faith / belief is methaphysical, a manifestation of spirituality, transcendency in which I believe, not because I can argue and present irrefutable arguments to defendi t (because I can’t) but because I FEEL it. And that no argument can take away from me. 3 - A religion is “good” / beneficial if it makes a person individually and a society collectively better; a religion is “bad” / pernicious if it makes an indidual or society worse. 4 - More than half of the Bible (and of many other holy books of several religions) is constituted by symbolical narratives (stories of example, parables, myths) that can’t be interpreted literally. The historical part must be interpreted in the context to which refers, a specific time-place that cannot be generalized or replicated; only shows a partial picture of a particular people / community in a point in time. 5 - Ideals are also shaped by the Zeitgeist and the real people of a certain time and society. Thomas More in his Utopia (considered one of the first models of a perfect socialist society) admited the existence of slaves. He was a religious man, a visionary and wrote Utopia as a project for a better world… yet… From the three greater monotheist religions (Judaism, Christianism and Islam), only Islam used slavery systematically to subjugate the peoples of the territories they conquered. The choice was simple and evil: either you convert or become a slave of one or other kind. In the 20s (20th century) there were still market slaves in Cairo and other Islamic regions of Middle East. Until the present day, Islam still fullfils literally the words of the Koran (ex. ISIS). If the ancient Jews created the ideals of Judaism (at least 4000 years ago) and of Christianism (2000 years ago - never forget that Christ was a Jew), that doesn’t mean that either the ideals or the conduct guidelines are the same now, because they are not immutable, that’s obvious. That’s the great difference between Judaism and Christianism on the one hand, and Islam on the other. Islam seems monolithic and immutable, incapable of self-criticism and evolution. Islam was born as a warrior religion (not a religion of peace) and never really stopped implementing that aggressive modus operandi.

“One of the things I enjoy doing in terms of how I study the Bible for example is I like to look at contemporaneous religious texts of the time. So I like to study the Bible alongside for example Hammurabi’s Code” I am genuinely baffled by this statement. I have never heard the Code of Hammurabi described as a “religious text” - nor do I see how it could be characterized as such. Moreover, the CoH was authored around 1765 BCE (give or take 25 years) while most scholars place the writing of the Pentateuch sometime between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE. How is that “contemporaneous”?

I can’t get over how different Ben Shapiro is when he is not talking to an audience of kids. I wonder if Ben Shapiro would do another round with Alex, without the third guy. That would be pure gold.

Ben switches between moral absolutist to moral relativism with the flip of switch anytime it comes to the evils God did in the Bible. He always states that God had to appeal to people of his time, but this God is supposed to be all power and all knowing so can literally do anything. So when God presents his message by making rules for how to keep your slaves, this makes this God evil, period. This God would have the ability to end all slavery by snapping his finger, but chose not to.

I can't hear the words "Ben Shapiro" without thinking of the word "disingenuous".

that is a win for the sensible part of humanity. Religious people are all moral relativists, it says it all

"God is the same in the past, now and in the future" OK Ben what about slavery? Um that was then, this is now

Alex is turning out to be one of the sharpest interviewers of the generation. He is prepared for his interlocular, his logic is quite good and he uses it to make pointed questions. He maintains an excellent demeanor throughout.

I'd really like to see this debated between Alex and Doug Wilson.

Alex has a Superpower of bringing civility to debates and allowing people whom we normally scream at to present their "arguments" semi-coherently. Then he lets them crush themselves under the weight of their own inconsistencies. Absolutely brilliant.

My God Alex, you've done what so many people haven't been able to do for decades - this may never, ever happen again. You got Ben to plainly wrestle with the notion that "the scripture is contradictory". I don't know if I can be an atheist anymore because you're a miracle worker.

it's a shame that an omnipotent omnibenevalent god can't even convince his own followers to not do evil things.

I could easily write a paragraph for every phrase that Ben says here, with every phrase being an assertion of a person that is innocently duped. He simply doesn't understand there are at least 3 alternative viewpoints to everything he states, and he only sees one. I picked the first one, and comment below, but then I had to write another because he added another assertion next in the same sentence. This would go on page after page. Ben is so enamored with being gullible about his precious book, and his apologies he layers on top that aren't in the book. He talks like a kid who studied really hard for a test, while he didn't notice the book was entirely made up... Gr8! Peace ☮💜Love

Why can’t more debates be like this?

8:48 Ben Shapiro tries to disprove the fact that he is a moral relativist by explaining that morals change over time and across cultures. What a cogent point.

"Who's the moral relativist now?" Bravo.

I put it on 0.75 speed and Ben actually sounded normal!

There's a nice pair of articles on Medium examining this video, one by a former Christian now an atheist looking at Shapiro's comments and another by a former atheist now a Christian examining O'Connor's. I don't think our AI masters will allow us to post the direct links.

This is exactly why Ben debates college students mote than anyone

Ben's argument basically: "Cmon you're expecting too much from God, who do you think he is, a god or something? He's trying the best he could given the constraints, so just give him an A for effort."

Have you ever done a deep dive on the shroud of turin?

In confused as to how Ben debated this. There were a few times he could’ve mentioned how the Bible was written by Human authors and a Divine authors and so we read the Bible trying to understand the intention of both in the 2 senses; literal and spiritual. He could’ve mentioned how God chooses to not reveal himself every week because then it wouldn’t be a choice to follow him. He could’ve mentioned how humans are sinful in nature and given a manifold of examples how humans secular or not break moral codes wether it’s from themselves or God or the punishment is a slap on the wrist or death. So even if God did explicitly say don’t do something that doesn’t mean humans will do it. The founding fathers being the most ready example.

Alex has gone so far, I can't help but feel proud for him

God taking "pragmatic" considerations is just blatantly silly to me.

5:00 No no, it's not a liberalizing process, it's a manual for conquest. It's a survival guide. It's good Machiavellian advice for conducting an effective war after which you can be assured of nobody taking vengeance on you. What's the problem with that?

Love that this is an actual conversation, not a yelling match or making shit up. Good stuff!

I absolutely love these types of debates. It's okay to disagree with someone and still be respectful to each other. Great debate and very interesting.

Alex playing the role of Socrates to perfection! Ask the right question at the right time and let them talk themselves into confusion.

Petition to have Alex and Ben collaborate on an April 1st joke debate. Feed the transcript and some humorous ideas to ChatGPT and ask it to write a short debate script that ends with both getting up and walking away backwards, then just read whatever it hallucinates or use it as the basis for something wonky.

I would greatly enjoy you having a conversation with the fellow Brit, Paul Wallis, and reviewing the context of biblical history from his point of view!!!! Do it!!! His channel is called the 5th kind.

Isn't it extremely curious that the values of god align perfectly with the values of the people at the time the book was written. Its almost like the book was written by people based on their own values, not the values passed down by god.

If I didn’t know who Shapiro was before this, I would never guess he had a reputation for ‘destroying’ people.

If Alex spend a week with Shapiro, he might even talk Shapiro out of religion entirely.

"Who's the moral relativist now?" 💀

This is the most infuriating aspect of debating morality with Christians. In one breath, they claim that, if Christianity and religion have any value, it's in providing humans with an unrelativistic moral framework. Yet when you call them out on the wildly immoral stuff in the Bible, suddenly it's "Well, the context of history" and so on. The mental gymnastics on display here are obscene. EDIT: Yes, I know Shapiro isn't a Christian - the point stands for all believers of Abrahamic religions (and many other religions as well).

Which is more likely: that a perfectly moral being not only didn't denounce slavery but actually offered protocols, or that men, who clearly saw the value in owning slaves, left that out of their book of myths?

11:56 Hi "Timed Comment Sorter" this is the last moment of the video.

i love this its my favorite kind of debate

Did Ben just say "It was considered moral back then....... but thats not moral relativism." lol that is pure complete moral relativism.

Imagine thinking you could humanize slavery

My question to Alex would be: As an atheist, how do you know that slavery is a evil thing to do? How do you know that? Are you just taking this for granted? What is your basis for morality?

I'm VERY conservative, but not at all religious. I've always made this argument with religious people and they just can't grasp it. To put it simply; Morality is and always has been determined by SOCIETY. NOT religion. They are only loosely tied because religion used to make up so much of society.

Props to Ben for not just storming out like another person did.

If God was opposed to slavery from the start, why did he allow it to get to the point where slavery was so widespread?

I would LOVE to see Alex on Cultish or Apologia Radio!! 👍🏼

To say that the things people did 4000 years ago were immoral but then judge those who did something 30-50 years ago as wrong has a small level of hypocrisy to it.

This is what happens when Ben attempts debating someone other than college kids who have no idea how the real world works

Their argument is God doesn't know how to say, "HEY! DON'T DO THAT!" to slavery and have to basically tippy toes all over it is just hilarious. Like, how on earth can you even justify that. I guess this is just proof that if you need to justify immortality, you need religion.

I try to not live my life by simple aphorisms, but whenever you're on the side that tries to make slavery seem not as bad as it actually is, you're on the wrong side.

I have never seen Ben so rattled. I have just come across this channel. What a great conversation with Alex. Instant sub!

I love how different both minds work, obviously Alex is the most logical human being in my list, that is the whole thing why people watch him in the first place. Ive been following since the first time I heard him, such a priviledged mind. Seeing Alexs audience grow restores my faith in posterity. Thank you smart dude

“My god is no better than some of the lamest political candidates in human history” is not the argument I expected out of ben

Only when one truly is in the mindset of the SPIRIT of freedom, such as a believe in their heart, of a higher power, does the matter of SLAVERY, truly matter.

"Hey mabe dont own other humans" is not very radical, it just says a lot that it took centuries to come to this position. It points to the fact that morality is a developing thing over centuries instead of something that can be expressed in a static text

Ive heard this speech over and over. If the people choosen by God does it and God allows it, it ain't immoral. If foreign people with different ideology commit the same act, it is immoral. Because my God and only my God has the moral authority to command and demand (see the Old Testament) or redeem and condone (see the New Testament) such acts. So those who won’t obey my God don’t have the same rights as me. Only I can do it because only I have the ultimate moral authority on my corner. Because if my God wasn’t the ultimate moral authority he wouldn’t be God to begin with.

I love healthy and respectful debate where disagreement isn't seen as 'hate' or 'aggressive'. More please!

Ben's losing this one badly. When you win the gold in mental gymnastics, twisting yourself into a pretzel, it means you've lost the argument.

Imagine thinking that God is all powerful yet unable to convince people not to own slaves

I can't imagine giving my entire heart and soul and mind to a religious text that I don't even at times agree with or understand. "If you want to understand that then you can become a religious scholar and spend your whole life on it." Really? If the text can't readily be understood and interpreted and consistent, what good is it as a blueprint for how we should live our lives???

You won the debate. If religious moral absolutes are open to contrary interpretation, they aren’t absolutes and the premise fails.

It's a good thing that the documents of the new testament compilation is the missing piece of the logic puzzle here....

Asking “why didn’t God…” in any context is crazy, no matter which side you are on.

I love the answer “well I’m not god, so I don’t know,” it’s such a pathetic handwaving technique apologists do that allows them to not have to confront very basic truths that we know about human well-being and suffering.

Wow I can't believe he actually debated a person who isn't an ill prepared, emotional college student. Alex I love you man and love your content. Keep being the beacon of intellectual debate we know you are!!!!

shapiro was very unconfortable not debating a depressed college student

I recommend checking out Billy Carson

First time I've seen Shapiro stumped, he actually dealt with it better than I expected, probably due to the reasonableness of Alex. Quite the convo sir, well done.

i like alex's beard

Alex, thank you for mentioning the blatant abuses women continue to suffer at the hands of people who use the Bible (old and new) to act in ways that are clearly immoral. We have a long way to go.

God: can't get rid of slavery because it's too radical. Also God: gonna have everyone speak different languages so they can't understand each other and also magically spread them all over the world.