So I've been watching a debate that was on ABC (American ABC) about whether Satan is real. It has your friend and mine, Mark Driscoll, plus Annie, a hooker for Jesus, a Bishop who believes whatever the person he's with wants him to believe and the one and only Deepak Chopra.



You can watch the whole thing here or on YouTube

What's initially interesting for me is that the debate even happened. Can you imagine a debate getting an hour of airtime on an Australian network on prime time* about the existence of Satan? It's not exactly the question that every Australian is asking.

The debate seems to be biased towards Satan's existence giving the liberals a need to convince everyone why Satan doesn't exist. Plus they don't even have any atheists in the debate. Three of the four people in the debate have some sort of Christian world view.

When they take questions from the audience there are a large amount of Christians wanting to prove Deepak and the Bishop wrong. When the Christians in the audience get a hold of the microphone to ask questions, at times it gets predictably embarrassing. That large amount of Christians asking questions however have something to do with the fact that the debate was hosted by ABC in the Mars Hill Church Auditorium. I reckon the Mars Hillians may have been the majority of the audience. Still the fact that that was allowed to happen, rather than the producers putting in an effort to give the debate a neutral location is telling in itself.

For a look at US religious culture, it's interesting.

Aside from that, it's been interesting for me to see how little my world view links up with the Bishop and Deepak. Maybe I'm unable to get my head around enlightened ideas, but I really couldn't see the sense in many of the ideas about God that they were talking about. God became both an unknowable and ineffable force out there, as well as just a creation of our own higher consciousness and a way of understanding our universe. Chopra said at one point "God is our highest instinct to understand ourselves." Which doesn't really make much sense. How can God be God if God is an instinct?

This isn't to say that all non-Christian world views don't make sense to me. Atheism makes sense. Agnosticism makes sense. Islam makes sense. Judaism make sense. Mormonism, while being totally whacked, makes sense. But this new thought enlightenment mysticism stuff I'm yet to get my head around, I don't even know what you really call it. Maybe I should go read a book about it.

Aside from all that they did say some stuff about Satan not being real and that all the evil in the world is caused only by humanity's own propensity for evil. That I can understand. Satan or no Satan, we humans probably do alright at destroying ourselves without his help.

Generally their biggest issues were not with their views of Satan but God. While I tend to agree with Mark and Annie, I wish Deepak and the Bishop had done a better job at challenging me. I believe in God and I believe in Satan (though I have very different feelings about the two) but I love it when someone gives those beliefs a run for their money.

*Actually the thing wasn't really shown in prime time, it was on at 11:30pm. But at least it wasn't 5:30am in Australia's Benny Hinn slot.