Why Armoured Skeptic is both correct and wholly wrong about Prager U. Part 1.

     I have enjoyed the @armouredSkeptic  (which I highly recommend regardless of this blog) YouTube channel for quite some time. His videos tend to be well thought out and often quite entertaining. Recently he put out the above video and being one who occasionally watches his videos for some out of the box thinking in comparison to my own, I find much of what AS stated to be at odds with much of my own feelings. On one hand AS is quite accurate in his statements about Dennis Prager and his religious zealotry. I am not one to openly bash religion, in fact I have written on my feelings about my fellow citizens who are religious here. Over the next few blogs I will attempt to lay out my case as to why throughout this video AS is right, wrong, and sometimes intellectually dishonest in his opinions about Prager U.

     So within the first minute and a half he is already setting up a straw-man. "and the thing about Prager U is even though they market themselves as a 'intellectual outlet' their audience doesn't really seem all that open to intellectual debate" is a direct quote preceding the first Prager U cut. The video portion he shows is a rather crazy person who would later go off the deep end and have his videos removed from Prager U for burning books. More on this later. The edit shows an opening talking about whether you can have a disagreement and still be friends. Obviously I believe the answer is yes to that and so is Prager U's with one bit of nuance. If two people having a disagreement on a path to achieve a shared goal then in fact you most likely can be friends. If your goals are in conflict with each other then likely hood of sharing values is low, depending on the goal, and friendship may not be possible, and even enmity may arise from said disagreement. The irony of his attempted take down of this edit is disingenuous simply because his statement was about the audience, of which I am sure he knows none, and then he shows a Prager U video as if that proves anything about Prager's audience. I guarantee you like most of political and religious YouTube, the audience varies greatly in all demographics among those who agree and disagree. His initial stab at Prager U seems to fall short for that reason. 

     During the next critique AS discusses Prager U's video "What Was the Enlightment" which I also recommend watching because it is... well it is something. Although AS's statement is short and precise, it is spot on. The clip that AS shows is a statement "why give the enlightenment all the credit?" in the context of the fact that all those we attribute the unique or gargantuan ideas to, drew from the writings and teachings of previous philosophers and jurists of English common law. While I understand Prager U's point, I find it pedantic and dishonest. The idea that "The best and most important parts of modernity were given to us by individuals nearly all held conservative religious and political beliefs" is verifiably false, especially by today's idea of conservatism. If Hamilton or any founder for that fact were alive today they would accuse my fellow countrymen of cowardice for allowing the government to get as big and powerful as it currently is, and conservatives haven't been truly concerned with shrinking government since Ronald Reagan was President. 

     The contradiction between the aforementioned above video and this one is a good point, but it also feeds into a something that AS does not seem to understand. Prager U hosts many different people to do these videos and the thoughts are often unique and not related to other videos. The diversity of ideas is not something we should scoff at. We could use more out there. Morality and reason can come in many forms, and often what is reasonable to one person is grotesque to another. How do you know what's right or wrong unless you try to understand the nuance and not just poke the surface. 

     That will be all for this blog, but I will pick up where I left off for part 2. If you enjoy this please leave a thumbs up and give it a remind. If you use Brave I accept BAT through my Twitter account @redleger. Thank you for reading.