Interesting that you thought Singer did better than Hitchens & Dennet. I watched the debate on Youtube a few days ago, and a lot of comments expressed the opinion that Dennet did better than Singer. But I haven't seen the other debates, so I can't compare. I did think that Singer did a good job, being respectful of D'Souza and his lack of cogent arguments.

Another thing that annoyed me was how much D'Souza focused on Singer's personal views - e.g. killing babies up to 28 days old. He spent his whole opening argument talking about the "dangerous consequences" of atheism. I was glad that Singer nipped it in the bud and said "We're here to debate the existence of god."

This was probably my favorite part of the debate. When atheists do good things, it's the result of immersion in a Christian society. When they do bad things, it's because we're evil and we worship Satan and eat babies. Singer called him on it too. Dinesh got served!

I actually hate this debate tactic. It's sort of like a reverse appeal to authority. Like instead of "Newton was a brilliant physicist... and he was Christian. Therefore, Christianity is right," it's "Well Hitler authorized the killing of millions of Jews... and he was atheist. Therefore, atheism is evil and wrong."

There have been good theists and bad theists, and good atheists and bad atheists. None of that has any bearing on which ideology is right. I wish we could ban the practice of using famous figures to support arguments, and just focus on the actual claims made by religion. Of course, if we did that, Dinesh would have nothing left to say...