Showing posts with label false accusation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label false accusation. Show all posts
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Friday, February 26, 2016
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Monday, June 15, 2015
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Thoughts On the Growing Injustice Against Christianity In America
We’re told that judges have no right to refuse to impose laws they feel to be unjust, civil servants have no right to refuse to participate in a state sanctioned activity they feel is unjust, pharmacists and doctors are denied conscience protection and businesses have no right to refuse to do something which goes against the moral convictions of the owners. But, they do not apply this to themselves. Thus, we’ve seen governors and attorney generals who refused to defend/enforce the laws defending the traditional concept of marriage.
Americans seem to be so blind to the fact that the these arguments are only applied in one direction, denying religious freedom to Christians with a moral conviction that a law is wrong, while giving license to any other group (ethnic, gender, religion, sexual preference). What we have is the replacing the rule of law with diktats aimed at favoring the allies of politically approved ideas and harming those opposed to these ideas. The sad thing is, in the past we have lionized people who stood up to the state and said, “I will not comply with an unjust law.” These heroes in American history recognized when a judicial ruling or a law was unjust because it forbade them doing what they felt morally obligated to do.
The common tactic to justify this injustice is to try to link their cause to the Civil Rights Movement. For example, proponents of “same sex marriage” try to point to segregation laws in the 19th and 20th centuries and claim that the belief that marriage can only exist between one man and one woman is the same thing as oppressing African Americans. But that is a false analogy. The two sides are not equivalent. One can affirm that a person has rights as a human being without indulging a moral behavior believed wrong. But the Civil Rights movement existed because the laws of the time denied the fact that African Americans had certain rights as human beings.
In fact, the banning of interracial marriage (so often equated with the defense of traditional marriage) was a legal invention that invented an artificial barrier between male and female on the basis of determining that one ethnicity was inferior to another. That intention to discriminate is not present in the defense of traditional marriage. The defense of marriage recognizes that male and female runs across all national, ethnic and religious lines and those categories do not change what marriage is.
But “same sex marriage” does change what marriage is, by denying the complementarity of the genders as what marriage is intended to accomplish. The concept of “same sex marriage” reduces marriage to a legally recognized sexual relationship—something we do not accept as a valid definition of marriage, and something we will not cooperate with.
However, rather than actually try to discuss our concerns, the tactics today are very much similar to the attacks on Christianity in the times of Pagan Rome…making false accusations about what Christians believe in our opposition to what is morally wrong. Then, like now, Christians were charged with “hatred.” In that case, the charge was “hatred of the human race.” Here, it is “hatred” of the people who benefit from something we call morally wrong. The fact that we deny the charge is ignored—just as it was ignored in Roman times. If we will not do what those in authority want, we can expect to suffer whatever people can get away with inflicting on us (even when the Imperial government of Rome did not persecute Christians, many times governors and mob rule did).
Christians were accused of false crimes like cannibalism and incest in the times of Pagan Rome. We are accused of hating women and people with same sex attraction. Then and now, we deny these charges are a part of our belief. If anyone who professes Christianity committed such crimes, they would be acting against what the Church teaches. The fact is, while loving a person means treating them with all the dignity which belongs to being a person, this love does not require us to do for them what we believe is morally wrong.
Note this distinction. Contrary to accusations, we reject the claim that we support the mistreatment of people because of their actions and reject the claim that our refusing to support what we believe is morally wrong is rooted in hatred. We also reject the antics of extremists who invoke the name of Christian while actively doing things our religion forbids against those we believe do moral wrong.
America has a choice to make. Either our nation can act like the Roman Empire (except using lawsuits, fines and prison instead of lions) unjustly persecuting us because we refuse to do what we think is morally wrong, or it can act like what our Founding Fathers intended in limiting the government—forbidding it to interfere with our moral obligations to do good and avoid evil.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Dark Times: Reflections on Anti-Religious Propaganda
12 The wicked plot against the righteous
and gnash their teeth at them;
13 But my Lord laughs at them,
because he sees that their day is coming.
14 The wicked unsheath their swords;
they string their bows
To fell the poor and oppressed,
to slaughter those whose way is upright.
15 Their swords will pierce their own hearts;
their bows will be broken. [Psalm 37:12-15]
Reading the news, it seems that the foes of the Church have largely abandoned the pretense of trying to separate Pope Francis from the teaching of the Church. Because they believe that victory is imminent, they now write as if the Church is defeated and needs to change and get with the program if she would survive. However, we refuse to roll over and submit, and this angers those who hate us. The thing is, people who oppose the teaching of the Church are not satisfied with having usurped the legal power to implement what they desire. Rather, they want everyone to accept their desires as morally good. But as long as we’re here to remind them that God exists and their behavior separates them from Him, we are a stumbling block to their plans. So, they hope that they can drive us into irrelevancy by silencing us and persuading people to come over to their side.
They do this through both overt attacks to drive us out of the public square and through persuading individuals that it is better to follow them than to follow the Church. But they can’t do this by giving their position and letting each person decide what is true. They have to misrepresent our beliefs to make them seem dangerous and malicious. They have to make it appear as if it is the Church who is trying to force changes, when the Church is simply insisting that the truth remains true, regardless of culture or era.
Dr. Peter Kreeft shows the problem in one of his Socratic Dialogue books:
Libby: It sounds like sour grapes to me. You’re complaining because we’re winning.
‘Isa: No, I’m complaining because you’re lying. For a whole generation now you small minority of relativistic elitists who somehow gained control of the media have been relentlessly imposing your elitist relativism on popular opinion by accusing popular opinion—I mean traditional morality—of elitism, and of imposing their morality! It’s like the Nazi propaganda saying Germany was victimized by Poland.
[Peter Kreeft, A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 141.]
The political and cultural elites of our nation have portrayed the situation as if a group of antisocial misfits suddenly appeared in society with the intention to persecute people who think differently than they do. They portray it as if “enlightened” people are finally throwing off the shackles of these misfits and benefitting society in doing so. So they tell the world that Christians “condemn” because we hate—that we hate and fear anyone who will not submit to what we say. They dredge up the behavior of the worst history has to offer and portray it as if this was the norm for what we would do if they let us get away from it. Basically, the lie they use is to say that the world was as enlightened as the 21st century until religion—especially Judaeo-Christian religion—came into being, and sought to control human thought through fear and superstition.
This is, of course, false. But it is quite effective. Look at modern programs on TV. Look at how they portray religion. Practitioners of religion fall into two groups. Either they are cold, hostile people who are bigoted and hostile to anyone who thinks differently, or they are willing to compromise their beliefs to get along with the world. The former are villains and the latter are heroes.
They tried to fit Pope Francis into this mindset. They took his words out of context and tried to make it seem as if he was “heroically struggling” to bring the Church into an “enlightened” view. But he had too much to say in defense of the family and Catholic teaching to spin. Now they either ignore him or lump him in with those who they once contrasted him against. Now the media has to look to individual Catholics who rebel against the authority which Christ gave His Church and portray them as the enlightened ones. The ultimate result of this distortion of the Pope was not the changing of Church teaching, but deceiving many hitherto faithful Catholics into questioning or rejecting his authority as the successor to St. Peter, wrongly thinking that the Pope is in the camp of the compromisers.
At this time, the elites of our nation seem to think they have won. The Church is on the defensive while the courts seem willing to give them everything they ask for, ignoring the fact that these rulings violate the beliefs that our nation was founded on—that the government does not have the right to compel a person to do what their religious belief forbids them to do.
So, it is indeed a dark time. But we need to remember we cannot give up in despair or simply hunkering down in a bunker, deciding to survive while the whole world goes to hell. There have been dark times before, where the state wrongfully sought to usurp authority by making laws it had no authority to make. Yes, things can indeed get worse. We can indeed be personally targeted by unjust laws or even physical persecution. But we have to remember that this is not the first time such dark times have happened. In every other time, the Church continued to stand up and perform the mission Christ gave us.
People may hate us for telling them the truth, showing them that their chosen actions are not compatible with the love of God. But they are not our enemies, but our patients. God doesn’t want them damned, but wants them to turn back to Him. Our task is to cooperate with that great commission, regardless of whether the world wants to hear it or not.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Missing the Point: Church Teaching or non-Teachings?
Today I ran across a claim on the internet that the Church could change Church teachings on moral issues, because she had made changes in the past. When pressed on the question, one individual pointed to the Church changing the rules on eating meat on Friday and the “extermination” of those who refused to convert to Catholicism as proof of changed teachings. The person went so far as to claim Papal bulls sanctioned this extermination—though when pressed was unwilling or unable to name any.
That wasn’t unexpected of course. When one does not understand how the teaching of the Church works or does not know of the doctrines and history of the Church, it’s easy to believe all sorts of claims about the Church without actually looking for evidence for the claim. Thus, there’s a lot of cases going around where there is common knowledge—where the response is “everybody knows THAT,” but when one tries to find evidence for what “everybody knows,” it turns out that nobody actually knows of any...
I find that people tend to make one or more of four errors when it comes to the Catholic Church and what she teaches. These are:
- Confusing a discipline or other decree with the official teaching of the Church.
- Missing the Point about the actual Church teaching.
- Misunderstanding a term used in a Church document, thinking it means something more than it actually does.
- Wrongly believing that an abuse which is done by a Catholic is the intended teaching of the Catholic Church.
I’ll take a look at these things, and see where they go wrong.
Confusing Discipline/Decree With a Church Teaching
Church teaching is not everything a member of the Church says—even if the person speaking is a bishop or the Pope. The Teaching of the Church is what the Church formally intends to teach as being binding on all the faithful as a matter of the faith or morals of the Church. So when the Church says that same sex marriage, contraception and abortion are intrinsically (that is, always wrong regardless of motives or circumstances) evil, this is a Church teaching. This is not something that is optional, or that the changing circumstances of the times will let the Church decide to do things differently.
However, when the Church decides that members of the Church need to practice a discipline for their spiritual good—for example, Friday abstinence from meat, permitting or withholding the chalice for the laity, whether the Mass be said in Latin or the Vernacular, or even whether or not the clergy must be celibate—these things can be changed if the Church deems it to be for a greater good. So now, we can choose another Friday sacrifice instead of giving up meat. The Church has at different times decreed that the laity may or may not receive the chalice. And, if the Church truly sees a need for it, she can change the discipline of whether the Church ordains married men (as she does in the Eastern Rites) or only ordains celibate men (as she does in the Latin rite). Making a change in these matters is not a case of “the Church was wrong then but right now” (or vice versa for traditionalists). These are situations where the Church makes a decree based on certain conditions.
Missing the Point About the Church Teaching
This brings us to the next issue, which is keeping in mind what Church teaching is actually under consideration. Consider the common canard that the Church changed her teaching on “eating meat on Friday means you will go to Hell.” This is to miss the point. In this case, the Church teaching is not that eating meat on Fridays is evil. The Catholic belief is that the Church has Christ’s authority and that what the Church binds or looses on Earth will be bound or loosed in Heaven. If a person willfully rejects a discipline mandated by the Church for the good of the people that person is rejecting something bound in Heaven.
Another common accusation made about Church teaching being changed is the issue of loans. The argument is that formerly the Church forbade lending at interest, but is now OK with it. Therefore, the Church can change her other teachings. But it wasn’t interest that was the problem. It was the problem of usury (the practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest). In different economic systems during the Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Medieval period and the Enlightenment, what was an unreasonably high rate of interest was different from one period to the next. So the Catechism of the Council of Trent could condemn any interest on a loan while over 200 years later, Pope Pius VII could say some returns on investments were acceptable, but profits that were made based on harmful methods of lending were not. (I imagine the modern practice of Payday loans would meet the criteria for condemnation).
When the only means of exchange were coins and barter, and when every person was paid a fixed amount a day, then charging interest on a loan could mean extreme hardship for the person in debt. But when money could be exchanged with notes, deposited in banks and used to bring in profits, it became possible for people to pay off certain loans. In the first instance any charging of interest would be usury. In the second, some charging of interest would not be usury. So, we can see that the Church did not go from saying “usury is wrong” to “usury is OK.” She merely updated the understanding of what was and was not allowed.
But we have to avoid the fallacy of irrelevant comparisons. One cannot argue that the change in economic conditions changing what met the definition of usury means that the Church can change her teaching on sexual morality. Economic systems can change. The genders and the nature of the sexual act do not change.
Misunderstanding a Term Used In Church Teaching
So, where does the idea come that the Church permitted the extermination of people who would not convert? It comes from applying a limited meaning of a word in modern English which actually has a much broader meaning in different times. The modern meaning of exterminate is "destroy completely; eradicate.” But, when you look at the Latin word, exterminare, we find that it has a different meaning: lesser banish, expel; dismiss. So, while some people may point to the Lateran IV Council (AD 1215) and quote the following from canon 3:
Secular authorities, whatever office they may hold, shall be admonished and induced and if necessary compelled by ecclesiastical censure, that as they wish to be esteemed and numbered among the faithful, so for the defense of the faith they ought publicly to take an oath that they will strive in good faith and to the best of their ability to exterminate in the territories subject to their jurisdiction all heretics pointed out by the Church; so that whenever anyone shall have assumed authority, whether spiritual or temporal, let him be bound to confirm this decree by oath. But if a temporal ruler, after having been requested and admonished by the Church, should neglect to cleanse his territory of this heretical foulness, let him be excommunicated by the metropolitan and the other bishops of the province. If he refuses to make satisfaction within a year, let the matter be made known to the supreme pontiff, that he may declare the ruler’s vassals absolved from their allegiance and may offer the territory to be ruled by Catholics, who on the extermination of the heretics may possess it without hindrance and preserve it in the purity of faith; the right, however, of the chief ruler is to be respected so long as he offers no obstacle in this matter and permits freedom of action. The same law is to be observed in regard to those who have no chief rulers (that is, are independent). Catholics who have girded themselves with the cross for the extermination of the heretics, shall enjoy the indulgences and privileges granted to those who go in defense of the Holy Land.
[Schroeder, H. J. (1937). Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation, and Commentary (pp. 242–243). St. Louis, MO; London: B. Herder Book Co.]
I imagine people might be shocked on reading this. Isn’t it genocide? Well, no. If you look a couple of paragraphs down, you’ll see an admonishment for the people who interact with the exterminated heretics...
If any refuse to avoid such after they have been ostracized by the Church, let them be excommunicated till they have made suitable satisfaction. Clerics shall not give the sacraments of the Church to such pestilential people, nor shall they presume to give them Christian burial, or to receive their alms or offerings; otherwise they shall be deprived of their office, to which they may not be restored without a special indult of the Apostolic See. Similarly, all regulars, on whom also this punishment may be imposed, let their privileges be nullified in that diocese in which they have presumed to perpetrate such excesses.
We can see that the heretics are not exterminated in the sense of “The Final Solution.” They’re exterminated in the sense of being ostracized. We see in other documents the calling for bishops to use the penalty of interdict to exterminate heresy. Interdict was the refusal of Mass, Sacraments and Christian Burial. In modern times, interdict is applied only to a person, but in the past, the Church did apply it to regions. The point was to bring heretics to their senses by denying them the ministry of the Church until they repented (and see 1 Corinthians 5:5 if you think this is an unbiblical behavior), showing them how serious this was.
Wrongly Believing That an Abuse is the Actual Teaching of the Church
There’s no sense in denying that some people in history who professed to be Christian did behave in a way which was wrong. Not just wrong by the 21st century standards and sensitivities. I mean things that even back then, should have been obvious to people. So the mess that was the Spanish Inquisition, the wrongdoing by some in the Crusades—these things were wrong. The problem for the accusers is the fact that the Church condemned the evils done at the time. They didn’t always speak out effectively, and they weren’t always heeded. But they spoke out.
Here’s something to think about. Consider the Catholics who present themselves as being pro-abortion. They act publicly and ignore the teaching of the Church. is their disobedience the fault of the Church? No, because the Church does have a clear teaching that is being ignored. Sure, a person may wish that the Church was more forceful in certain times, but one can’t say that the Church supported these things.
The fact is, many of the events people point to as proof of the wickedness of the Church (the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders and the cruelties of the Spanish against the Native Americans are popular accusations) were actually denounced by the Church. But, like today, there were many Catholics who chose to ignore the teaching of the Church, and like today, many got away with it. There is only so much the Church can do against the willfully defiant. That doesn’t mean the men who led the Church always did enough or responded perfectly. Sometimes they even used their office to do wrong. However, these failings were not a part of the binding teaching of the Church.
So What is a Teaching of the Church?
So, now that I have said what the teaching of the Church is not, one might ask what a teaching of the Church is. The first step is to look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church #888-892. The teaching of the Church is based in preserving the teachings of Christ as passed on through the Apostles. It is "to preserve God’s people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error” (CCC #890). When the Church intends to teach in a way which "they propose in the exercise of the ordinary Magisterium a teaching that leads to better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals" (CCC #892) or when the Pope “when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful—who confirms his brethren in the faith—he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals” (CCC #891).
So, many things which people point at, in an attempt to deny that the Church is protected from error, were never considered teachings of the Church in the sense she intends to be understood as teaching. Many others were not teaching what her enemies accused her of teaching.
When one wants to critique the Church, the first step is to determine whether the Church was teaching something as doctrine, and if so, what the Church intended to teach when binding the faithful. The Church can certainly make certain disciplines binding that are not teachings of the Church, but disciplines can be changed if the need requires it without contradicting Church teaching. Criticisms which fail to take into account what the Church intended to teach are doing nothing more than creating a Straw Man fallacy, condemning us for something which is either false or taken out of context.
Friday, December 26, 2014
TFTD: They Revile What They Do Not Understand
But these people revile what they do not understand and are destroyed by what they know by nature like irrational animals. (Jude 1:10)
A couple of days before Christmas, I was involved in a combox discussion on the issues over the satanic counter to the Nativity Scene in Florida. My own thesis was that the putting up a “religious” display with the intent of protesting religious displays was a self-contradiction. What struck me was a comment from one of the atheists. It was a tu quoque claim that the Bible was full of contradictions. Today, there seems to be a lot of atheists on Facebook and in the comboxes bashing Christianity over Neil deGrasse Tyson and his tweet in celebration of the December 25th birthday of Sir Isaac Newton (the actual tweet struck me as being more pathetic than offensive, apparently trying to imply Newton was more important than Christ).
Basically, the theme is that Christians are stupid for believing in God while blaming Christianity and religion in general for every crime in the history of humanity (denying the role of the atheistic ideology in the worst atrocities of the 20th century). These things are pretty tiresome, and fairly frustrating. The bashing is basically illogical and factually wrong. They would actually be easy to refute—if people took the time to listen and investigate whether what they say is true.
Ven. Fulton J. Sheen expressed things very well when he wrote:
“There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church—which is, of course, quite a different thing.” (Radio Replies vol. 1)
Ven. Archbishop Sheen makes a good point. The Catholic Church is not really hated for what she teaches, but for what people think she teaches, and when people run afoul of the Church teachings, we are told that these teachings were made out of hatred of women, of people with same sex attraction, of divorced people, the poor, the rich, sexuality etc., simply because we have a teaching on the morality of certain actions.
People don’t even ask what we teach, let alone why we teach it. People assume that the worst possible portrayals of the Church in history are true, never realizing that even in past centuries there were people with ideologies and axes to grind who had no problems denigrating the Church to build up their own agendas. Because they know nothing of Catholic teaching and history, but assume the Church is capable of the worst, they assume that the horror stories they hear must be true and done out of sheer malice—never mind facts and the context of the times.
Sometimes I wish people couldn’t post on a subject online unless they could demonstrate they understood what they were bashing.
But we shouldn’t expect that. Our Lord did warn us that we could expect hatred from the world if we sought to be faithful to Him:
18 “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you. 20 Remember the word I spoke to you, ‘No slave is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. 21 And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me. 22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin; but as it is they have no excuse for their sin. 23 Whoever hates me also hates my Father. 24 If I had not done works among them that no one else ever did, they would not have sin; but as it is, they have seen and hated both me and my Father. 25 But in order that the word written in their law might be fulfilled, ‘They hated me without cause.’ (John 15:18-25)
So we endure hatred and try to reach out to the person of good will who wants to learn the truth, praying for all of them.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
When Christianity Stands Against Favored Causes
Introduction
The foundation of America was based on the premise that no person was naturally superior to another and that no group could coerce a person or group to do something they believed was evil. Of course, this premise also presumed some common sense responsibilities as well. If you believed a group believed the wrong thing (for example, believed that a religion taught error), you didn’t try to force that group to change because they had rights too. You simply didn’t associate with that group (either by leaving it or not joining it in the first place), and you used reason and politeness to explain the truth as you understood it, recognizing this as a civilized exchange that led to a greater understanding of what was true.
That’s not the case nowadays. Today we have favored causes and favored classes whose beliefs are given special treatment, imposed on all at the expense of those groups who believe they are wrong. It doesn’t have to be this way of course. It is possible that even if one way of thinking is recognized by a majority of a nation, that the minority can practice their beliefs without being hindered by the majority—provided they do not do harm on others. But that isn’t the way things are here in America. Here we take the all or nothing approach where if something is deemed favored, all must accept it.
Right now the denigrated class is Christianity—specifically Christianity which insists on moral values that the state has no right to alter. This is the belief in God who encounters the human person individually and as a group and teaches them the right way to live, and what acts are not compatible with this belief. It is reasonable that an institution that is established by a Christian denomination (like a University or a Hospital) will be run in accordance with the beliefs of this denomination and it will not act contrary to these beliefs. It is also reasonable that an individual who belongs to a religion (and takes it seriously) and owns a business will not run his business in opposition to what he believes. So a customer or an employee who wants a service which runs contrary to the religious beliefs of the employer should either do without or go to where the service can be provided—so long as it is not harmful to others. Otherwise that customer or employee is trying to violate the civil rights of the employer.
Now, if an employer does not have a philosophical basis, then the beliefs of the employee do not matter, and it would be unjust to take action against them because they hold a belief.
The History of Racism and Its Misapplication By Weak Analogy
The problem we have in America that is we have a legacy in this country of racism. It formally (that is, enshrined in law) extended from the founding of the country to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and informally (that is, held by individuals and some groups, but not recognized as acceptable government policy) even today. It was an ugly legacy with dehumanizing slavery and then attempts to keep an ethnic group separate and oppressed. Most people today recognize it was a shameful part of our history.
Unfortunately, Americans have a habit of using the fallacy of weak analogy which looks at two events and assumes they are identical when the differences are actually more significant than the similarities. For example, some have actually tried to argue that the opposition to "same sex marriage" is the same as the racist laws which forbade interracial marriage and conclude that opposition to “same sex marriage” is also motivated by bigotry. The problem is, this analogy is weak because it has only one point of similarity, laws limiting who can be married, but many points of dissimilarity.
For example, the laws against racial marriage presumed that reproduction between a member of a Caucasian ethnic group and a member of an African ethnic group would end up “diluting” the “superior” Caucasian ethnic group. “Same sex marriage” cannot involve reproduction. So, right off the bat, this is a major difference. Another difference is that the shameful laws of racism in America were based on the belief that the people of African origin were less human than Caucasians, while the opposition to “same sex marriage” is based on the belief that some behaviors must never be acted on. I could go on, but these two examples show that the motivation for the two laws were entirely different. Sure there could have been people who took a moral prohibition and treated the person acting on it with hatred, but the hatred by some of people with same sex attraction did not cause the laws against “same sex marriage,” but hatred did cause the laws restricting African Americans.
The Begging the Question Leads to Self-Righteous Justification
This Weak Analogy leads to the fallacy of begging the question. This is where a proposition which needs to be proven is assumed to be true without proof. Opposition to abortion and contraception is assumed to be based on “controlling women,” when that’s the point that needs to be proven. Opposition to “same sex marriage is assumed to be based on “homophobia,” when (again) that’s the point which needs to be proven.
The Supreme Court of the United States made this fallacy when it struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (United States v. Windsor), assuming the motivation was intolerance, when that was the point to be proven. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, "The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.” That the purpose was “to disparage and injure” is precisely what needed to be proven. Instead it was assumed to be true.
The Result Is The Attacking of Christianity For Opposing a Favored Cause
When Christianity opposes legitimizing something that is morally wrong, and that moral wrong is a favored cause, the result is that Christianity is accused of holding these views out of hatred and intolerance. Basically, the argument is:
- Nothing Good can Oppose X
- Christianity Opposes X
- Therefore Christianity is Nothing Good.
The problem is, the major premise (Nothing Good can Oppose X) needs to be proven, not assumed to be true. But because nobody is questioning the major premise, the conclusion is assumed to be true (falsely). This means that Christianity is viewed as a hate group that needs to be isolated from society, much as one would want to isolate a Klansman or a Neo-Nazi.
Conclusion
What we have now in America is a case where politicians and judges favor certain stances and promote them in law and judicial rulings. When they declare X good, they effectively declare those who oppose X to be enemies of the state. Because the favored causes today involve things that are morally wrong from the Christian belief, Christianity must be the enemy of the state. The problem is, the Constitution does not allow the government to decide Christianity is an enemy of the state. But so long as the branches of government set aside the Constitution to favor a cause, we can expect this attack to continue.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Sunday, October 26, 2014
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