Showing posts with label Easter Debates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Easter Debates. Show all posts

Thursday, July 10, 2008

David Wood vs. Sami Zaatari: "Was Muhammad a Prophet of God?"

Here's one of the debates I did back in March (part of the "Easter Debates"). I'm still waiting for an edited version (one that combines the footage from both cameras), but the raw footage will do for now. On an interesting note, I learned that I'm less aggressive when I debate in Virginia, where Muslim friends and their family members are sitting in the audience. I feel like I'm trying to break things to them gently (which isn't how I feel when I debate elsewhere). Anyhow, this was a fun debate. Sami Zaatari was a pleasure to work with, and I look forward to the two debates we're doing in September. I will certainly need to do a post on his "But Christianity suffers from all the same problems you're bringing up" tactic, since (a) I didn't really get to address this in the debate, and (b) I don't see how Christianity suffers from ANY of the problems I raised. One interesting aspect of this debate is that Sami didn't take the standard approach when dealing with certain criticisms such as the Satanic Verses or Muhammad's assassinations. Instead of denying that these events occurred, he simply argued that they're not really a problem for Islam. I was very impressed that he didn't throw out all of history (which seems to be the standard approach of Muslim debaters). Here's the debate for now. Sam Shamoun's commentary on the debate can be found here and here.